Mike McGee wrote:
I think I understand thanks for the help your right why have the same
information in 2 places.
seems I need to rethink a little bit. thanks again
Mike McGee
MBR Guaranteed Foundation Repairs
You can do what I do - claim that having the info in two places will
make the queries have one less join. But that approach has burned me
in the past. I set up a database that had a tblJobs with about 100
fields. The fields belonged in that table except for three departments
with four fields of information each. A few years later, the company
liked the department information so much that they decided to get more
detailed information by having eight departments with eight fields
each. Plus backward compatibility to the old 12 fields got the table
to about 164 fields. They were pretty pressed for time so the quickest
way to implement it was to add the fields. They also liked to have
editable datasheet subforms despite my efforts to limit them. The
simpler queries allowed them to keep editing the subforms. So everyone
was happy. Recently, several of their customers have been demanding
capacity studies broken out by each department. But the new quotes
have 24 departments. I'm now forced to normalize so that all 24
departments can be tracked by hours quoted and timetickets. I had to
explain that the whole process is going to take much longer than
before. I explained that they won't be able to edit some subforms
because the extra join makes some queries too complex. Plus, the slow
transition requires that I leave all the old fields in for backward
compatibility so that all the reports will work until new ones are
made. Not to mention the backward compatibility of the backward
compatibility (they like being able to go back pretty far). So if I
seem to be harping on normalization it's because I just went through a
painful lesson. I still don't like normalization to the nth degree but
my tradeoff point is fluxing towards more normalization. On top of all
that, one secretary is on a crusade to have ever larger forms where any
and all information is obtainable. Think in the neighborhood of
hundreds of fields on the main forms. It seems that prevailing office
practices denormalize databases and work toward degrading performance.
I've tried explaining how it works to them but they prefer convenience
to speed.
James A. Fortune
