An Updated Data Model Has a Choral Arts Group Singing

If you've ever inherited a database that's home-grown, you probably can relate to Donna O'Connor, former Director at Choral Arts, a non-profit emsemble of singers. When she started her job, its database was a mess: it had been built up over time by a succession of directors, and had no plan or data model,. 

Worse, the data wasn’t properly separated by subject and much of it overlapped. To get a complete picture of any donor, Donna had to look at multiple tables, figure out which records pertained to that person, and then figure out which data was current and correct. There were many versions of the truth. Several people worked with the database, and Donna didn't have a good way to prevent new inconsistencies from being introduced. In short, Choral Arts' data was redundant, unreliable, and hard to use.

She knew it could be better, but she wasn't sure how to get there. Choral Arts couldn't just stop working with the data until everything was all straightened out.

A writer on the Office Help team knew Donna and brokered a sweet deal: we'd help Donna wrangle Choral Arts' database into shape, and she'd share her story with the Access community.

Our plan was in three steps:

1.     Sit down in front of the whiteboard and hash out a data model

2.     Create a new database using the data model

3.     Import as much data as possible from the old database

How'd it go? Watch the video to find out.