1 or many Tables?

[Sam Summers]

Hi there

I am using 17 tables to hold information on equipment that each use the same fields.
My reason is that for any one piece of equipment there could be as many as 500 - 1000 items so if I were to use one table it may have to hold up to 17000 items.
Is the way I am currently doing it better than having one potentially large table and for Access to have to search for all the items of the required name during searches/queries?

Thank you in advance

Sam

 

[Sam Summers]

Thanks very much Pat,

I had set this up already but it was good to get confirmation that I was doing the right thing.
Basically the normalisation tells the story and Like you said with multiple tables, - queries etc. begin to get awkward.
It never pays to jump ahead without normalising properly.

Thanks

Sam