© Dolinski 2008

This presentation will help you with the database section of your coursework. It will cover: – What you need to do in order to get top marks – How to do the things you need to do!

Tables are used for storing information. Information is made up of different bits of data. You can get information about your music tracks based on it’s data: – Length of track – Genre of music – Artist – Song title – etc

A piece of data must be given a data type. Data types tell the database what type of data to expect, whether it is a number, text or date for example. To get good marks you will need to make sure you choose suitable data types.

Data TypeDescription TextUsed for anything which contains text characters or numbers which aren’t numbers (like telephone numbers) NumberUsed for real numbers like lengths or seconds AutoNumberAutomatically increases when a new record is inserted Date/TimeUsed for dates and times BooleanUsed for Yes/No or True/False data types

As well as saying what data types the fields should expect… You should also tell the database how many characters can be accepted into the field. This will help prevent bad data entering the system and also help reduce the size of your database. You can do this using the field size option in the design view. In this case, 25 is a more sensible option as there are no fruit or vegetables that have 255 characters!

Validation rules prevent bad data entering the database. They tell the database to only accept certain inputs into the fields. For example, fruit and vegetable names should not contain any numbers so a validation rule could be “Only allow text characters”. If the validation rule is broken the database will display the message which is written in Validation Text.

You can find a list of validation rule examples on

Queries are used to search and sort information which is stored in a database. They are very powerful and can be used to create new content…such as a playlist and recipe card.

You can define criteria for the query to use when searching for data. In this case, the criteria will make sure only fruits that are green will be displayed.

You can make this query more flexible by asking the user to enter the criteria values. Using this example a message box will be displayed to the user and they will enter the criteria manually. In the criteria you must use []. What ever you type inside the [] will be displayed to the user. All they need to do is enter an appropriate input value for the query to return results!

Forms are used for inputting data into a system. The fields will follow the same validation rules as the table as they are directly linked. Any data inputted through a form will be saved into a table.

Reports are used for displaying data in a user friendly way. When you run a query the results are displayed in a table format…not very nice to look at!

Running a query through a report can mean the data is displayed in a more user friendly way.

The database plays a key part of the project and, together with the Dance-o-Meter, is probably the hardest part of the coursework. This means you should probably schedule more time for you to complete it in your plan. Don’t be put off though…its harder because there are more hoops you need to jump through in order to get the marks…but each hoop is wide enough to fit through!

Your Dance-o-Meter should provide the user with two codes. – The first code will give them a code for their preferred style of music. – The second code should provide them with a code for their level of fitness. With those codes, the user should be able to generate a playlist for which they can dance to. The codes will be entered into your database using a query. A report should be created which uses the results from the query.