Task 1 - What are the benefits of a relational database?
A benefit of a relational database would be that the data is only stored once. This means you don’t have to change multiple records and it doesn’t take up much storage space. For the veterinary practise this is ideal for them, as this is the main reason to why they’re changing from paper to Microsoft Access. Having everything on Access and not on paper means they can search for information quicker through the search bar and also it can all be stored on a hard drive. This will save money on buying filing cabinets, on storage space, time spent looking for information and on buying materials such as paper and ink.
Another benefit would be its more secure. This is because you can split the tables into two, making one of them confidential by adding a username and password. This will then limit the amount of people that can view/change the data, which is what you’d want if someone were to take/hack your system because the files wouldn’t be viewable unless they had the username and password. Another way this can be used if a receptionist needed to access your details, for example their address, they could do so. But they wouldn’t be able to access other parts of information, for example their card details.
With quickly accessing people’s information being very important as you don’t want to keep the customer working, being able to perform a complex query is critical. This can be done thanks to a language called TSL, which was developed to allow people to ‘Insert’, ’Update’, ‘Delete’, ‘Create’ and ‘Drop’ table records. You can narrow down these records even more if you use the ‘Where’ clause.
Reporting
Database reporting is the results of a formatted database query and will have useful data in it, this will allow you to make better decisions and also make it easier to analysis the data. You’ll be able to find reporting in most business programs, these will be built in tools that will be at the