Robert,
In Oracle the DBA has the option of enabling or disabling AUTOCOMMIT.
COMMIT is what you understand to mean updating tables in Access. With
Oracle, more than a few users (professional DBA's among them) have burned
hours away at a problem that ultimately boiled down to a failure to commit.
Access works a lot like Excel in many respects. In Excel edits to a cell
are saved as soon as you accept the changes using [Enter] or click the
little green check mark in the formula bar. I would find it confusing if I
made an edit to a cell in an Access worksheet (Excel language is deliberate)
and that change was not saved without an explicit command.
Also, in the case of designing forms for data entry what you want is a
design which helps the clerk key as many records as possible in an hour. So
the form should be designed to minimize the number of keystrokes needed to
complete a record. Adding an explicit [Ctrl] [S] or some other meta key
combination to save a record adds a step to the data entry process and
incrementally slows down the clerk's speed and increases the costs to have
that record keyed. It's a piddly amount of time/money per record but over a
day's work or a week's work it would add up.
Access is supposed to be an easier to use relational database. It
is--compared to Oracle or others. I like the fact that my edits to a record
on a bound form are saved without having to explicitly save them. It makes
data entry fast and saves me from my forgetful self.
"Robert" <pr**********@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:lQ******************@fe06.lga...
I would like to know why Access tables are updated immediately upon being
changed (in table view or forms view). It seems to me that, at least with a
single record form, that Access could have been designed so that there
would be no permament change to the table unless specified explicity by the
user. I am aware that you can program around it with unbound fields.
I would like to know WHY it was done this way. If you know why it was
done this way, please respond.
Robert
