Title
One Comapny - Three Divisons - Multiple databases?
Post
Hi
I am a new FM user, have wanted to do this for a long time, but felt it was too big a job....my thinking has changed and i am ready for the plunge!
BACKGROUND
We are a small company divided into three seperate divison (each selling a different product or Service). We have 11 Associates, each one of them can interact with either of the divisons at any time. Many of our Clients will be connected to either 1, 2 or all 3 divisons. Two of the divisions have inventory with pictures etc that we would like to include in our database. The third divison is basically a service orietated divison.
QUESTIONS
- what is the best way to setup the database(s)?
- should we make a database for each diviosn and then have relationshipds connecting them?
- How big can a database be?
Any advice in the initial building of teh database(s) would be greatly appreciated.....
Thanks
Andrew
1) there is no one "best way" but do keep your design to a single database shared by all departments. Your post clearly describes data that needs to be available to more than one such department. Note that a "database" can consist of one database file with many tables or can be made of many files. There are trade offs inherent to each approach. The data modeling--deciding how many tables to define and what fields should be defined in each, is critical to getting a good database design and requires knowledge not available to people responding to your post.
3) you are more likely to run out of hard drive space before your database will be "too big" for fileamaker, but very large data sets (more than 10,000 records say), require carefull handling and there does come a point (with many more records than that) where other database systems better designed to handle such large amounts of data should be evaluated as a better option.