One Big Single, Or Several Smaller Databases?

[Carl Morris]

Hi everyone,

I am sorry if this is not in the correct topic, but I am new having just bought FMP Advanced.

I have a huge contact database which is currently on Address Book, and exporting it over to FMP is not a problem. Many of the contacts I have are people who do charity work like myself, but some are just friends and a few others my tenants for my property business.

I was wondering if it is better to have one big database with all the contacts in and create layouts etc, or should I have a separate file - one for properties, one for friends and the other for the charity-related people?

I am learning this as I am profoundly deaf, so telephone calls are out of the question, and the idea is to be able to e-mail the relevant people in mass-mailing to keep them all informed on the charity front.

Many thanks in advance,

Carl

[Fenton]

I moved the topic to "Relationships", as the "Forum Feedback" is a special forum, especially since we just got a new makeover. The "Relationships" topic is the catch-all for many design questions.

First, this should about "tables", not "files". This should be 1 file with multiple tables.

Yours is a tricky question, not so much from a FileMaker point of view, but from a logic point of view. Normally I would say, "these are all people, keep them in the same table, and tag them so you can keep them apart when needed." But I wonder, especially about tenants. There are two reasons: 1. Tenants would never be friends or charity contacts, and would never share their operations, and, 2. Tenants may require many relational links and operations which would never overlap with other people. You could expand this area to cover all operations with your Properties, and you'd want that completely separate on your Relationship Graph. They could still share other separate tables, such as Phone, Addresses, etc., if you decide to split those off (for flexibility).

I suppose you could say the same about friends. But a charity contact could also be a friend, and in any case, there would likely be very few operations exclusively for friends. So you'd just need to exclude exclusive (not also charity contacts) friends from mass mailings, which should not be too hard.

So I think I'd go with a Contacts table (charity contacts and friends) and a Tenants table, unless there is overlap which I'm not seeing.

[Carl Morris]

Hi there,

That makes absolute perfect sense. I need to train my mind up to see through the eyes of a database person, i.e. yourself and I can see exactly what you mean by overlapping.

I agree that the tenants will never, ever have anything to do with charity work, or be 'friends' even though one does tend to become friendly with some, such is my relationship with them.

With that in mind, I will create one for the properties, and a separate one for the charity work and friends, as I have many friends who offer to help me to do collections, or control the crowd and collect donations while I play pool.

You have made me realise I need to look for these overlapping before I create anything, so I will think long and hard about this.

I have the FMP - A Missing Manual but I am only on page 148 so I have a fair way to go yet. I will complete the book so I have a better idea before I actually convert my contacts.

Lastly, thank you for moving the topic - my terminology isn;t good enough yet to know what goes where.