Database startup tips for small businesses

For small businesses, databases can be a great tool to track and communicate important information for their business. The problem is that most people do not know the most effective ways to use them. The database is only as good as the people using it, so much effort is needed in planning choose the right data input into the computer. Here are some foundational tips how to obtain  good information when starting a database:

1. Useful data
2. Accessible data
3. Prevent ambiguous database objects
4. Uniform database object names.

Useful Data

Do not store junk on the database, make sure you will actually use the data in the future, for example, if you owned a small pizza shop you could store customers data that could give you  information to see the frequency of visits, to track how many new customers showed up that week, and to track which pizza toppings that are the most popular. You would not care about your customers hair color, it is not useful so don’t store it. This may be a simple example but it is important to understand because many people will just put what ever information they can think of. There are two reasons why this is bad:

1. Hard drive space is expensive–the more you want to track, the more you need to store, so don’t waste the valuable resources of your hard drive.
2. A great amount of data can be harder to manage, why make things more complicated if they don’t need to be

Just make sure that the information you decide to keep track of is useful and you will have a good start for your database.

Accessible Data

Next, make sure that the data is easily accessible because you may find that although the data could be useful, it will take too much time if your data is hard to find. Again, you are just starting out if it is not necessary and will take too much time to obtain, then maybe you should consider not using it. If the data is necessary, then you will need to find a way to get it that are not too expensive because most data is accessible for a certain price. Hopefully this will not be a problem for you because taking away data can be easy than finding hard to access data.

No Ambiguity with names

I you are making you own database in Microsoft Access or FileMaker Pro, then you will be making the database yourself. Although this blog is not how to make a database, I will cover some tips on how to ensure proper data. Make sure all your table, queries, forms,reports, field, and boxes have proper names; it may be easier at first to use the default name, but as your database gets bigger, it will be a hard to find and information and even worst it will be a nightmare to edit the database later (trust me, i made the mistake once and i was ready to pull my hair out).

Database Object Uniformity

Naming your tables with a prefix  table, for example “tableEmployee”s, makes it much easier to build a database, especially when lists of tables and queries are combine. here are some standard prefixes:

• txt for Text Box (txtStartDate)
• cmb for Combo Box (cmbEmployee)
• lst for List Box (lstGender)

you can make your own if you like but make sure that they are easy to remember and follow to stay consistent throughout the database.

These are just some tips when you are starting your database and if you follow them, you database will be much easier to access and maintain.

May these tips help you survive the business jungle