If you're looking at learning a bit more about database design (looking at your description of what you've done in creating a separate table for each category of item sold sounds like you're approaching it as though it was a flat-file rather than a relational database), there's a few books that I could direct you to:

Beginning Database Design (ISBN 978-1590597699)
Database Design for Mere Mortals (ISBN 978-0201694710)
Databases Demystified (ISBN 978-0072253641)
Absolute Beginner's Guide to Databases (ISBN 978-0789725691)

I've also got an older book that's always sitting by my desk called Dreamweaver MX Databases (ISBN 978-0782141481), which I still reference regularly - chapter 3 on coding practices and chapter 5 on database design provide very good overviews of the subject.

There's also a Database Development for Dummies, but I'm not a huge fan of the series where they're tackling technical subjects.

Without knowing the data you're modeling, it's quite difficult to make generalisations, but I'd probably be looking at a single table called 'Product' (which contains all the product records), and which had in it a boolean for 'new item' and for 'on sale' (you could then use SQL to filter out new and/or sale items when you create your recordset). I'd then have a look up table called 'Categories' which held the values 'necklace', 'handbag', 'belt', and 'purse' which the Product table could then reference to identify.

Breaking your data down into a logical structure like this is called 'normalisation' (see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalizati on)> - although it's a bit technical. There's a simpler practical explanation of a similar query to yours at TechRepublic (http://articles.techrepublic.com.com...1-5288500.html), which uses MS Access, but don't worry about that as it's teaching a concept which is applicable no matter what the database server.