Question

I am relatively new to database design so I am still learning a lot. What I am working on is an online time card clock. I am just messing around with it to learn more. My full time job is working for my uncle operating heavy equipment and he has expressed some headaches to me. When going over time cards several employees hand writing is hard to read, several employees don’t add the hours correctly so he always has to double check their math, plus some people don’t hand in the time sheets on time. Most of the employees have smart phones so my solution is to just make a simple website that has a button for “Clocking in” and “Clocking out” it would also contain several text fields to describe what the employee operated that day and the job site they were on. All of this will be added to a database that will be emailed to the boss at the end of the work week. My question is what would be the best way to setup a database for this? Should I add a separate table for each employee or keep it all in one table? There will be about 20 employees that will use the site. Thanks in advance for any help.

Answer 1

General database principles:

Think about object orientation. Classes of objects.

• An “Employee” is one such class, therefore you should have one table that stores employees.
• An “Event” such as clocking in or clocking out is a general class of two specific cases, e.g. ClockIn and ClockOut.
  • You could consider one table to store an Event with a field for the date and time of the event, one field for the employee (a foreign key), one field indicating whether it’s in or out
  • You could alternatively consider one table for ClockIn, one for ClockOut, but this may not be advantageous depending on how you wish to scan the data later when printing reports. I’d personally recommend against this approach, just point out that it’s an option.
• Ideally, every table should have a numeric primary key
  • Think of key-value pairs
  • Employee
    • 1 Jon Doe
    • 2 Juan Gomez
    • etc…
  • Event
    • 1 2012-11-29 08:59 Clock In 2
    • This translates to Juan Gomez clocking in today just before 9am