MS Access question re multiple tables

bluejosiah

Forgive me if my explanation isn't explained very well, I'm not hugely familiar with databases and I am also asking on behalf of someone else.

I am trying to open a database in Access, I believe the original database was created in a more complex database. When I try to open it in MS Access it is opening up multiple tables rather than just one. In one of the tables it contains the first say 5 columns from the original, table 2 contains the next chunk of columns etc.

Would it be that the database created is just too large for Access to open just one table?

If you can help it would be very much appreciated, and I really wouldn't take the credit for myself

mrscruffy

bluejosiah wrote: »

Would it be that the database created is just too large for Access to open just one table?

Probably not - I have viewed databases in Access upto and including the Windows file limit of 2GB without problems.

I would suggest it is more likely is that the original database had multiple tables. What you need to do is create a query to join the tables using a field is both tables which is both common and unique to the respective records.

bookduck

Wiki 'normalisation'. It has to do with how data is split to be more compact, quicker and easier to manipulate and easier/quicker searching, rather than 'just too large'

isofa

It's set-up like this, because it's correctly setup as a relational database. The tables relate to each other via Keys (unique numeric IDs usually for a Primary Key), to save any duplicate data being entered.

e.g. if you have a Customers table and an Orders table, and Customer 1 has 6 Orders, you don't want to repeat the name and address of the customer 6 times (for all manner of reasons), you just want to relate it back to customer record 1, which will contain the correct details.

Create a query, which links all of the related tables together, via their Primary Keys (e.g. link the CustomerID from table Customers to the CustomerID from table Orders etc), and run it, you'll be shown a table of the entire data set, providing it can be related back that way.

Search the help, Microsoft site and web for creating queries, you can set them to make a new table of all the data if you wish.

spiro

It may be that the original database had more than one table that were joined (using common fields) to create a single overall view. Access is therefore bringing each table in seperately and you will have to recreate the join. If you have the original database file what was the suffix (bit after fullstop of filename) as this may give a clue as to what it was.

bluejosiah

Thanks for everyone's advice. I shared it with my colleague and we had come up with some similar ideas. My mind is just too full tonight, but hopefully tomorrow I will make more progress with some of your other suggestions!