Your database is obviously going to store data. What does that data represent? What "things" do you need to store in it? *Generally speaking, each "thing" gets a table. How do the things relate to each other? There's really no good reason to not be able to come up with a preliminary database design at least. Even if it's not perfect, you have to have some idea of what you data needs to look like because you have at least a basic idea of what data your application needs to take as input and display as output.