Hands-On Microsoft Access: A Practical Guide to Improving Your Access Skills

Chapter 3. Understanding Relationships

In this chapter, you will learn about the various types of relationships and how they integrate your data. Three main kinds of relationships exist: one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many. One-to-one relationships are by far the least important and interesting of the three, and I postpone discussion of them until the end of the chapter.

The other two relationships are central to creating powerful and effective relational databases. If you haven't had much exposure to them, you might find them difficult to understand and implement at first. I've tried to provide numerous examples of each type of relationship, in the hope that repetition will enable you to recognize them with ease and use them with confidence. At the end of the chapter, I also spend a little time talking about the formal rules of normalization, which you might come across in your Access work.

Because this chapter builds on the database design skills you learned in Chapter 2, "Database Design," I strongly encourage you to read it before proceeding.