I have had a very interesting and enriching ride over the past two
months taking my database of two files and doing with it what I should
have done four years ago when I first designed it. But now I'm
wondering if there is any end in sight, or if there should be, to the
number of files I create -- and apart from my own situation, this
might make for a lively survey among other users here.

A very brief tour of my system for tracking conference activity:

conference.fp5 Main contact file for a patron
event.fp5 Tracks which events a patron has come to
selections.fp5 Tracks individual event info, such as
payment status, confirmation, dietary
needs, other preferences, and various
fee summaries
payment.fp5 Tracks payments made
exhibitors.fp5 Basic info about exhibitors
crashcourses.fp5 Information about optional courses
social.fp5 Information about our evening social events

price_lookup.fp5 Lookup tables for fees, crash courses
crash_lookup.fp5 and social events
social_lookup.fp5


This is all working smoothly and (one of my litmus tests), I can still
identify each file and its function, and if something needs to be
tweaked, I know where to go to tweak it. But this morning, when it
came time to enter staff information (flight schedules, arrival dates,
salaries, duties, etc.), it gave me pause to wonder:

Do I create yet another relationship?
Do I really need a separate file for this?
When does enough files become too many files?
What criteria do I use to determine this?

I suspect that the answer might not be in black-and-white and that it
could even be a result of one's own philosophy of use. Therefore, I
welcome all input and look forward to what could be a lively
discussion about determining file and relationship structures...




--
Rick Altman
The PowerPoint Live User Conference
October 12-15, 2003 | Tucson AZ
http://www.pptlive.com