Huge Design Task

[dynamictiger]

I am looking for helpful hints and suggestions, currently I am in the process of designing a struture which is literally huge.

Essentially it is four distinct applications with a few thrown in major side applications as well. For example Sales quotes and invoicing, Tender Quotes and conversion to job and similar.

As far as I have worked through so far, I can see I would set up six seperate databases to store the tables.

Database one would contain common tables like clients, order details and suplliers

Four other databases would then link to the above tables and add their own tables for their specific functions.

Database six would then bring together all the other tables into a database soup.

My probelm is trying to draw the structure on paper to work out relationships. It seems all the 2d methods I can think of ain't working, and the computer modelling tools I have found so far are only extensions of the paper method.

 

[MoGryph]

Might it help to build the framework of all the tables themselves in 1 database, use the Relationships tool to lay it out visually, you know- get your ideas out, and then split the tables out afterwards?

-MoGryph
[8O)

 

[dynamictiger]

Thanks I tried this approach, however, when I got to over 1 megabyte of normalised data and was half way through the relationship table was becoming unrealistically complex.

I thought it might be worth trying a data modelling tool, and downloaded a trial.

Problem was as it was two dimensions (same probelm with relationship window) I was starting to have problems with the tasks.

I would point out this is a company wide application hence the larger than normal table structure. Each section of the four bases I have in mind is unique to itself, shared data residing in base 5.