As part of your table design, the very first thing you need to do is decide on the purpose for the table. Without knowing what the table is going to be used for, you can do all of the planning you like, is really not going to help you. For example, is this table going to be temporary or will it be permanent? That's the first thing. Is it going to be used for the purposes of doing something really quickly and then it's going to be deleted or is it going to be remaining in a permanent area under a database? The next thing you need to decide is if the table will have raw data coming in that is going to be entered by some application or bio-system, or if the data is going to be imported by some process. That will make a difference as well on how the table will be designed and what purpose will it be used for. Somewhere in there, you need to decide if the table is going to have perhaps inventory information or products information, or it will have information about logs or audit, or will it have information that is associated with your operating system or your network environment, or is it going to be products that you sell, or is it going to be part of a bigger system? All of these components will help you decide what the table is for. The purpose of the table needs to be determined first before you do anything. After considering those elements, you need to think about the schema of the table. Essentially schema is a table structure. This is where you figure out how many columns the table will have and what data will be in it. If you have a products table, for example, maybe you will have a product ID, maybe you will have a product name, maybe you will have a price associated with the product. Some of these things are very critical. You'll have the description of the product, won't you? Each one of these is a different datatype. Product ID is going to be numeric. The name is going to be a string. The price will be currency, or a double. Description is going to be a longer string. Schema has to be decided. The name of the table has to be decided. Depending on the type of table, the data that will go in it will be very different. If this table is not a products table belonging to a series of products, maybe it's a customer table. If it's a customer table, it will have a different series of columns. If it's a log for a particular system, it will have a different series of data. Depending on the data that will be inside of the table, the schema will be different and you need to decide what that's going to be. After that, there are just two important things that are left remaining. You have to build the table, no kidding, and then review to be sure that the table meets the purpose of the design. Building the table involves using what's called DDL or data definition language. Data definition language is what allows you to create a table, allows you to build the schema. Use a create table SQL statement, which is a data definition language of the SQL categories of statements, and then you'll simply review to make sure that the table, the design itself, the structure itself, the schema of the table meets the purpose that you originally designed it for. Table design, just stay with me, I'm going to show you what building a table looks like.
