I’m about to finish my first database and am in the planning stages to create
another. I want to express my gratitude to all that helped me with this. I
learned more with the help of this group in three months than in three years
of reading books and taking classes. I have the utmost respect for all of
you kind people. I just hope that I’ll be able to find you all when they
close down this site.

I need some guidance about my table set-up. I’m going to have a data table
that will be updated each month for employee, project and hours worked. I
want to have a master table for projects and would like to have a one-to-many
relationship with my data table so that if a new project pops up in my data
table, I’ll know about it. I have two obstacles about doing this.

1. Sometimes the project number in my data table will be truncated. I know
that it will be impossible to establish referential integrity so what’s a
good way of handling this. The only idea I have which I have not tried
before is to do an update query on my data table to add the missing parts but
not sure how to go about doing this.

2. My projects that are nonbilliable will remain the same from month to
month but new billable projects will be added monthly. These will not be in
my master project table. Should I separate the data into two tables
(billable and nonbillable)? Would this be best?

Thank you very much for any suggestions.