Best Approach for Resource Management System

[chiprivers]

After being away from coding for sometime, I am trying my hand at a small project to get my hand back in.  For no reason other than the challenge of it, I am trying to replicate an application which is used at my workplace for managing resources (people).

 

I am doing OK so far but I am after some advice for the best approach to use for the main part of this application.  I need to be able to record the availability of individuals.  There may be a large number of individuals using this system so I need to take this into account.  Each of these individuals will be required to enter in times of day on a rolling basis when they are unavailable.  Time will be broken down into 15 minute blocks.  I will need to be able to extract this data to be able to display a grid with individual names down the side (filtered) and columns across the page representing time blocks.  Note that there may be different reasons why the individuals are unavailable so a code will be applied to any period of unavailability.

 

I can see two options for approaching this.  Either...

 

i)  create a database table containing a record for every 15 minute block per individual using the system.  each record can then contain either the coding for the unavailability or a null entry if available.  This would mean a very large number of database entries but I can imagine it may be easier to extract the information into a simple grid, all beit it may require numerous querys of the database.

 

ii)  alternativel, only create one database entry for each period of unavailability for an individual with a start and finish time.  this would create much fewer database entries however I am not sure how I would easily query this data to display it into the grid.

 

Perhaps somebody has done somthing similar to this before and can give me some advice on the best route to go, maybe you can think of another alternative?

[chiprivers]

Have I explained myself well enough?