>We produce plastic film and for any give job at any give time for any given customer we may need to perform a lab analysis and present the customer with a lab report (certificate), which display the quality information about his product which he received from us.
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>To complete the lab report 574 fields/checks must be done. It takes us 6-8 hours to perform a single lab certificate. The lab techinician gets an id no. from management, which is his lab request #. The technician goes into his module "Laboratory Analysis" and enters the id number, select the customer, and job. no that the lab is requested for. There are 5 seperate categories to cpmplete a lab certificate. Mechanical, Physical, Visual, Composition & Running. A total of 574 field exists amongst all the tables together. Each tables contains field pertaining to its category. The record are relate by clab_id (lab request #).
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>Perferablly, I wanted one table with 574 fields. Each record is one lab certificate. Every record in the table would be a unique lab certicitate pertaining to a unique job. I only split the fields up into 5 seperate tables because of the limit of the no. of fields per record.
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>Now after having completed over 250 certficate, the lab technician wishes to search all the certificate by any of the 574 fields. Example, he wishes to find all certificates with Opacity of 0.

If the five different categories of lab certificate contain the same fields, or share many fields, you could have 5 different records in the same table, one for each category of certificate. Since some information is pressumably shared for all 5 of them (information that would go on the header in a report), this would be one table ("certificate"), and the 5 records would go into another table ("category").

Thus, instead of having 5 different fields for "opacity" (one for each category), you would do your search within a single field.

A special field in the "category" table would indicate to which of the 5 categories the record corresponds.