When designing an application and its tables, it's very important to capture the time dimension and determine how data should be stored with the expectation that it will change over time. While there's a natural tendency to keep data normalized so that the same information is stored in only one place, the time dimension also needs to be considered.

• What Needs to be Preserved Over Time?
• Making Sure Data Normalization Doesn't Lose Historical Data
• Shadow Tables

For more details, read our paper: Microsoft Access Database Architecture: Taking Time into Account and Shadow Tables

Additional papers and resources in our Microsoft Access Developer and VBA Programming Help Center