I am designing a database for the storage of Faculty Information. The primary purpose is for storing contact information that will be exported to an automated call system for contacting faculty about abnormal situations (weather related delays and
so on). I decided on a relational database that is in third normal form. One table will store School Information, primarily the School ID and Name. This will then be a one to many relation to the Faculty Information table. Which stores
the primary key Faculty_ID (table specific id), the foreign key School_Location (with a constraint to ensure the only data entered is from School_Information), Last_name, First_Name, Middle_Name, Active (currently employed or not), Created_By, Created_Date,
Updated_By, and Updated_Date. Next is a Phone_Numbers table that has the primary key Phone_ID, a foreign key Faculty_ID (constrained to only be a record from Faculty_Information), then a phone_Number. Finally we have a table called Email which
has the primary key Email_ID, the foreign key Faculty_ID (Constrained to only be a record from Faculty_Information) and then the Email. I chose to make the Phone_Numbers and Email tables separate from Faculty information because more than one phone number
or email could be associated with the same faculty. What I am curious about now is how should I go about making indexes in these tables? I am still unclear about the benefits of an index.
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