Best Practice To Create An Event Management Database

[benlehrer]

Hello,

My job is to re-make an entire database for a conference organizer.

Currently, the file structure is:

-4 tables per Conference: REGISTRATION,SCIENTIFIC_SESSIONS,SCIENTIFIC_LECTURES, SALES

This is a good solution but it was not exactly designed to be used for this many years.

Consequently, it has been used for 8years => there are 32 tables, and it's going to keep on growing.

My idea is to create one table for each department (sales, registration, scientific) and insert a field called "conference" in which i will enter the name of the conference (e.g. "lasvegas2011")

How can i create occurences for each conference, based on the same table?

I hope i made myself clear... even if it's not crystal clear for me!

many thanks for your time

[David McQueen]

Hello,

My job is to re-make an entire database for a conference organizer.

Currently, the file structure is:

-4 tables per Conference: REGISTRATION,SCIENTIFIC_SESSIONS,SCIENTIFIC_LECTURES, SALES

This is a good solution but it was not exactly designed to be used for this many years.

Consequently, it has been used for 8years => there are 32 tables, and it's going to keep on growing.

My idea is to create one table for each department (sales, registration, scientific) and insert a field called "conference" in which i will enter the name of the conference (e.g. "lasvegas2011")

How can i create occurences for each conference, based on the same table?

I hope i made myself clear... even if it's not crystal clear for me!

many thanks for your time

From my reading here, you are creating four new tables for each conference.

No.

Create a conference table with a conference name and a unique identifier. You can then relate registrations, sales etc to a specific conference.

Once the structure of the program is set up, you should not have to add tables on a yearly basis. If you are doing that, something is not right.

I have not purchased any books recently, but there are some good books out there on database design in general and on FileMaker Pro in particular. The one I remember for database design in general is Database Design For Mere Mortals (hope I have it right).