I know we (me included!) hate questions which are very general but I've got about zilch experience in the DB side of things so here's my scenario anyway.

We have a showroom/lab area with about a dozen printers, pcs, macs, of various types. These get used by salespeople for customer demos, by software analysts for testing and developing customer apps, by trainers for running training... etc etc.

So the ask in simple terms is how to construct a DB to take care of the bookings. ie, machine serial number 123 is booked Friday 1400-1600 by Joe for a dem; machine 456 is booked the whole week for a course; machine 789 is bust and the parts won't be here till Julember.

We're thinking of making it graphical.. I did Beacon's tut on images in a db. So I can make the db to have an entry for each machine, with picture, serial number, ip address, description etc. I envisage for example, scrolling thru the pics to the m/c I want, double click the pic to get the booking status... I see a dtpicker fitting in here somewhere but that's about as much as I can see so far.

I really don't know how to construct the other table/s I would need, which will contain the times, with a field for available, booked for dem, broken, stolen etc.... All machines have a unique serial number which could serve as the key between the tables.

I don't expect anyone to write this for me, but just some thoughts on you need a table with blah & blah, and another with more blah & blah. Or links to somewhere, like more tuts.

TIA!