Specific Questions first Ever Databse

[Faodavid]

Hi
I am building my first ever database and wondered if anyone could help me with some specific questions and / or suggest features that I should explore and learn about to speed up, automate and get the best results for - I can then try to find video tutorials of these features and teach myself.
As background it is for a music agency which sources venues for artists.
Initially I think I may need two tables:
1. Venue Table that includes location, contact, venue cost, capacity and facility info data
2. Artists Table which will track shows at venues throughout the country by different artists this would contain date, venue, location, sales and artist name
As I deal with some tribute artists I need to know which other similar tribute artists have played which venues on which dates so as to leave sufficient gap before placing my tribute artist in a venue or avoid certain towns /counties?
I believe that I will need to create a relationship between the two tables?
Initial questions:
On Venue Table what is the quickest way of data entry, some of the data will be the same ie
Location is broken down into Venue, postcode, address, town, county and region. So as an example if I have a venue in a town where I have a previous record of which county and region this relates to how do I auto complete for example Town is Burnley, county is Lancashire, region is North West?
Same would apply to artist table I know the venue name – is there a way to save time completing town, county and region, there are odd cases where there are more than one venue of the same name?
Process / Queries I will need
1. Find shows by artist X between 2011 and 2015 show me venue, town, county, region and date of show (how can this info be pulled from websites into a table to save manual input)?
2. Find me those towns / counties which have not had a show by the above artist in the last 18 months
3. On achieiving Pt 2- As I have only just started to enter data on venues, there are about 20 fields to complete – when I set criteria ie show me venues over 500 capacity with minimum stage size of X x Y – when a lot of my data is missing how do I create a query to include blank info until my database is fully complete?
4. On achieving Pt 2 is it possible that I can mass email these venues directly from Access to seek interest and availability?
5. Is it possible to take sales info from my artist table and use this with info from my venue table ie show all the towns that have not been played with capacities of 500 but show the top 10 selling venues for similar genre artists of those available?
6. Is it possible to export chosen venues from Access onto a map – Ive been looking at Excel Powermap and Mappoint but I’m still currently learning?
Any help would be really appreciated as I need to start prioritising tasks and learn key features so I can start to use the database asap
Thanks in advance
Dave

 

[plog]

First, you tried to apply a sense of order by numbering your questions/concerns, but you used 1 & 2 twice. So, my response will be general advice in no particular order.

You will need at least 3 tables:

Artists
Venues
Performances


Performances will be a junction table (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junction_table) that enables the many-many relationship between Artists and Venues (they can play there more than once, right?).

If you want to go hog wild on normalization for your locations you could use these tables:

Towns
Counties
Regions

If you do that, Venues only gets an ID from the Towns table and not County and Region data (you will obtain that by building a query and linking those tables).

Scraping data into your database from websites and sending emails is a whole other topic. If you have no scripting experience (VBA, php, perl) then you have a steep learning curve. Same for emailing (although that's a little simpler, but still need to know VBA). Mapping venues is difficult as well and I advice looking into the Google Maps API for that. All of these items are not really database related. For now, I'd stick to focusing on your table structure.

The rest of your questions seem to be query related and will be easily solved as long as you structure your data properly. My advice is to give it a go, layout your tables, their fields, then post a relationship screenshow here so we can provide advice.