Database design or database application development is an art.

You have identified the data items that you want to save and you know what data you want displayed on each page.  Which do you do first, User Interface design or Database Design?

That might be a matter of preference.  What I normally do is create my database tables first.  It’s easier to make changes to your database table structure than it is to change how data looks on the screen.  Screen changes do take longer usually.

MS-SQL has made designing tables so much easier.  You can even use the SQL script builder to insert into and update your tables.  Writing Stored Procedures is always the preferred way to save and retrieve date.  A convenient way to call the stored procedures would be from data access classes.  You generally encapsulate your data access routines into these classes.  Then from your front-end application, you would call the class methods.   This way you would organize your application.

IT managers often wonder how they should go about starting a project.   No matter how small or large your company is, principals are the same.  Even though with smaller organizations, you have fewer people to talk to, still the same path needs to be taken

Identifying the need

1. Conducting meetings with requesting organizations to define in clear terms what needs to be accomplished.
2. Creating a blue print of the final product.
3. Refining the final product by reviewing the blue print with the requesting organization.

Keep in mind that these facts about the blue print:

• While bullet points show the major idea, details may not cover 100% of what is needed.  This is just a fact of life.  Project definitions that try to define every minute detail, often times will take more time than necessary and will result in unwanted delays.  With that said, major points do need to be identified.
• When a project is being defined, requesting managers should always talk about the big picture, what is in the horizon and how the product of this application development project fits within the future of the organization.
• It’s important to conduct meetings with different people within the requesting organization to learn about other viewpoints and expectations about what need to be accomplished.

Next I will talk about:

User interface design

Database design and development.

Platform to use

Finding an application development team.

You have been using your Access database and an Excel spreadsheet to manage your database, You have been using these tools to update your data, sort it and query valuable information from it.   Now With the amount of data increasing, access is getting to be too slow for processing the amount of data youhave.  Plus with your database being such a valuable resource, your needs have expanded.   You Find yourself trying to learn how to use the more powerful tools that Access provides.  You find yourself struggling with Access spending countless hours and not getting the results you need.  Time that you could have spent developing your business relationships now has been wasted.

Trying to ask your employees to learn Access may prove to be a waste of company time as well.  After all you do need a dedicated database person in your company.  Someone who has the appropriate training to work with databases.

It all very soon becomes a headache and you feel like you want to have faster data retrieval, easier updates, more advanced ways to sort your data by different attributes.

What do you do?

You need a database application that encapsulates your database and gives you access to it via a user interface.  That way you or your employees don’t have to learn how to use the database.

Using a database application developer, you can tell them exactly how you want to access the data.  How you want the data displayed, what queries you need to do on a daily basis.

So where do you look for a database developer?  How much will you have to spend? and in this week economy…..