Re: Relationships. Does anyone use them?

Why would you even *consider* taking on the responsibility to ensure that
every table entry will still relate correctly to every other table, before
you allow any insert, delete, and append to take place, in any form, action
query, or recordset ... when the Access data engine can do all that for you?
That would increase the development time by at least one order of magnitude,
make maintaining the database a nightmare, and leave you still uncertain you
got absolutely everything covered.

The relationship diagram is a brilliant way to view the big picture of the
database. You can fit most of an average sized database on a printed A3
page. If the database is too large, Stephen Lebans lets you break it into
blocks so you can save and restore different views:
http://www.lebans.com/saverelationshipview.htm

I depend so heavily on engine-level integrity that I modified the
relationship report so I can see the field types, indexes, and the
properties that affect the relational integrity:
Relationship Report with extended field information
at:
http://allenbrowne.com/AppRelReport.html

--
Allen Browne - Microsoft MVP. Perth, Western Australia.
Tips for Access users - http://allenbrowne.com/tips.html
Reply to group, rather than allenbrowne at mvps dot org.

"salad" <oil@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:Sow4g.7230$BS2.6977@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I'm curious about your opinion on setting relationships.

When I designed my first app in Access I'd go to Tools/Relationships and
set the relationships. Over time I'd go into the window and see
relationship spaghetti....tables/queries all overthe place with lots of
relationship lines between here and there.

After that first app I didn't do relationships. If I had a query, I
defined the relationship. Many of the times when I create a new query and
add 2 tables together it creates the correct relationship between the two
tables. I believe this is due to using a foreign key with the same name.
I cared not about cascading deletes or cascading updates or the type of
relationship so the relationships window is clean of tables.

And if I need to, I'll create a query on the fly via code. Again, I set
the relationships. I know these queries aren't compiled for optimacy like
a querydef but operate well.

My apps don't appear to suffer from no relationships. Speeds very
acceptable, the results the same. So is setting relationships just more
overhead in creating an app and unnecessary...or do you believe the app
should have all relationships defined?


.

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