Database design advice?

[momagoo]

I have been asked to set up a system whereby users rate each other in an online survey (a 360 survey). Surveys are temporary things, and the idea is to do this over and over again with different data, so populating the database needs to be easy. Expecting anything from 100 to 10,000 users.

This will be my first project in SQL Server - I don't even have access to it yet, plan to develop in MSDE.

I expect to get data in a spreadsheet containing something like:

Rater name
Rater password
Ratee name
Relationship

My first inclination is to set up tables like:

User table (raters and ratees)
ID
name
password

Relationship table
Rater ID
Ratee ID
Relationship
Status

Or else I could just not normalize it and have one table set up similarly to the spreadsheet. I know SQL Server has data transformation, but will it help me do this? Or of course I could write a little program to transform the spreadsheet data so it can be imported directly into tables, which might be the best solution.

Advice?

Thanks,
Molly

 

[PTina]

I would suggest normalizing the data as you may find that the database will grow with time (e.g. you may need to add date and comment fields); especially if you decide to keep history.

With data transformation services you can easily import data directly from EXCEL spreadsheets into tables in the SQL database. So you should not have a problem converting the data.

Hope this helps.