Hello. My name is David. I work for a small family business and I have been asked to develope a database that stores our survey's that we have our clients fill out on a daily basis.

I have limited experience with databases and I was looking for opinions on my database design.

Some Facts.
each survey has about 30 questions.
each survey can be filled out by a client more then once.

Entities.
clients and surveys

My tables so far.

tblclients
---------
client_id autonumber/not null
client_lanme nvarchar not null
client_fname nvarchar not null
client_phone nvarchar not null

tblSurvey
---------
survey_id autonumber/not null
survery_date datetime not null
client_id int not null
question_1 nvarchar not null
question_2 nvarchar not null
question_30 nvarchar not null

*there will be about 30 question_# fields.

the tables are related through the client_id fields.

Does this design look like it will work?

You should look at putting the survey questions as a separate entitiy and the responses as a separate entity.

My updated tables...


Questions
-------------
*question_id autonumber NOT NULL
question_desc nvarchar(255) NOT NULL

Survey
-------------
*survey_id autonumber NOT NULL
survey_date datetime NOT NULL
survey_client_id int NOT NULL

Questions_Survey
-------------
*line_id autonumber NOT NULL
question_id int NOT NULL
survey_id int NOT NULL

Clients
-------------
client_id autonumber NOT NULL
client_lname nvarchar(255) NOT NULL
client_fname nvarchar(255) NOT NULL

Answers
-------------
*line_id autonumber NOT NULL
question_id int NOT NULL
survey_id autonumber NOT NULL
responce1-50 nvarchar(255) NOT NULL

I hope my tables look alright, I have many more questions, but I think its safe to say I should get my design set first before I start about inserting data.

Do you plan for a Question to be listed on multiple surveys?

Why do you have question_id and survey_id columns in your Answers table? Shouldn't the Answer reference a row on the Questions_Survey table?

It will be the same questions being asked on each survey. Will this change my design? I thought my design already reflected that?

I will adjust my tables according to your suggestion, it makes sense

This is a simple problem, keep the solution equally simple