In the SQL world, there are an endless myriad of tools available to run on all of the different Operating System platforms.

Some are graphical and allow you to draw relationships between your data.

For our purposes here, we'll describe our tables in a simple text list format.

We basically just want to make a list of the fields we think our project might need. Don't worry about knowing all the fields at the beginning. Anything extra can be added later. We'll describe strategies to alter your tables.

This will also be the beginning in our lessons where we start building a database project that holds company employees. We'll store Names, Addresses, and Phone numbers.

Here's a simple list for the three tables:

names table - a table to hold employee names

id: primary key
lastName: string
firstName: string

addresses table

id: primary key
nameId: names key
street: string
city: string
state: string
zip: string

phones table

id: primary key
nameId: names key
number: string
phoneType: string ["mobile", "home", "business", etc...]

The schema we are designing here allows a lot of flexibility. For example, for each name in our names table, we can have multiple addresses and mulitple phone numbers.

Later on in our lessons, we'll add more fields, such as salary.