Database Organization

A little background will help you understand how reservations and other database elements interact. Some of this may be pretty technical, and it certainly isn't required knowledge to operate the program.  But if you prefer to know more about why it works the way it does, then this section will help.

The Campground Master database is a relational database.  This means that it consists of multiple tables, which can be related to each other through relational links.  There are four main tables in the database -- Sites, Customers, Reservations, and Transactions.  (Parks and Operators are also tables, as well as all of the Pick Lists, but they're not important for this discussion.)  Each table is a collection of records, where each record represents one item (a customer, a site, etc.), and each record is a collection of fields, where each field is a bit of information (a customer's last name, phone number, zip code, etc.).

In most cases, you will work with the records of a table individually -- for example, when using the  Reservation Details dialog, you can only see or change fields in one reservation record at a time. Of course when viewing reports, you are looking at multiple records.  Where there is linking going on, it will be transparent to you.  But understanding what links do will help you make sense out of some things, like why the Notes column on the Arrivals View doesn't show the notes you just added to the customer's record (because the customer notes are separate from the reservation notes).

This is an example of how the main data tables are related, or linked, to each other:

- Each Reservation record is linked to one Site record and one Customer record.

- In addition, a Reservation can have a list of other "linked" Reservations linked to it.

- Each Transaction links to the Reservation and/or Customer it applies to, if any.  The Reservation and Customer also link back to the Transaction (so one reservation can have links to many transactions).

As you can see, the Reservation table is the primary table from which everything related to it can be reached.  When a report shows the customer name and phone number for a reservation, that information is actually coming out of the Customer table, through the customer link in the reservation.  Thus if the information is changed for the customer, it is automatically changed for every reservation that the customer has ever made.

The advantages of relational databases are many, but primarily it helps keep data consistent and allows the database to be much smaller since unique information is only stored once.