Updating student information for new school year

[Guest]

I built a database for last year and now students have graduated and I need
to update the data without hopefully building a new database.
How can I import the new data and have the information with the same student
IDs update?

 

[Norman Yuan]

The simple way is to have a field in the Student table that sets flag to
indicate whether the student is graduated or not.

You can have a Yes/No type field called "Graduated". Or you can have a
DateTime type field for Graduation Date..., depending on your database
design.

Then, in the forms and reports, if you do not want to show those graduated,
simply use WHERE clause properly in the "SELECT..." query to exclude records
of graduated students.

You should never build a new staudent database simply because of staudent
being graduated.

 

[John Vinson]

I built a database for last year and now students have graduated and I need
to update the data without hopefully building a new database.
How can I import the new data and have the information with the same student
IDs update?

If your tables are correctly structured, you shouldn't need to do much
of ANYTHING.

Your Students table should have information about... students. Name,
contact information, perhaps a link to a Families table, not much
else. That information will typically not change with the changing
school year, or even with that student's graduation.

Your Classes table similarly will change little - perhaps a bit more -
but I'd assume that every year you're offering Freshman English and
Junior Physics or whatever courses there might be.

You'll need to add new records to the Students table for newly
enrolled students, maybe new records to the Classes table for newly
created classes, update the Faculty table with new or changed faculty,
and - the only major change - add a whole bunch of records to the
Enrollment table to specify what classes students are in *this* year.

If you don't have these tables (under these or other names of course),
please explain. What information needs to be so drastically updated
that you're considering a new database!?

John W. Vinson[MVP]