Re: Relationships. Does anyone use them?

salad wrote:

Sounds like screwed up developing to me. In reality, no user actually needs to use forms for data entry. They can simply pound in data into the tables.

In a flat file, maybe, yes. In a relational database with many to many relations (not RI relationships)? No. Not even if one follows the natural key philosophy. UNless, of course, your user thoroughly understands the relational concept and thoroughly understands your structure.

What happens then is that there is no data verification and that's where problems occur.

Assuming you have a user who meets the criteria of my last sentence, above *AND* a _properly_ designed schema with appropriate foreign key (what relationships in Jet are), check (limit to specific values), unique (require unique values) and primary keys, then YOU HAVE DATA VERIFICATION.

Note that when I'm talking about an admin here, I'm not talking about the original developer or a normal user. I'm talking about someone who has inherited the application and data for looking after it. This happens when you sell your app to more than one customer.

Sounds like screwed up developing to me. If I had customers doing that behind my back I'd let them know they are on their own.

If you sell large enough applications you will have customers doing this "behind your back". It's their data, they own it. It is unrealistic in the extreme to think that a large organization's financial, inventory, and/or work accounting system (for three examples) is going to be well enough designed to meet the needs and vargaries of *ALL* customers without admins requiring access outside of the provided application. Ask any well established company that deals with the three examples I just gave, such as SCT (Banner), the Peoplesoft (MS, I think), Maximo, Archibus and so on.

Ultimately, a database application's most important asset is the data, not the forms.

> The need for adjustments should be referred to me. I create a
form to do so and voila, no problem anymore.

I won't harp on the point that you just said the user doesn't really need forms other than to point it out. 8)

You will quickly find that the type of adjustment needed is going to vary greatly by customer and if you have 100s or even 1000s of customers for a single product that your solution above is only practical if a large enough number of your customers think it necessary. And, you will find, that for every one who thinks it necessary, there will be others who think such is not appropriate and don't want anything to do with it.

Indeed, all of my everyday Access work has to do with creating reporting apps (mostly) on the data of other systems that are powered by Oracle or even sometimes, Jet. Because our organization is one of 1000s for two major and very expensive DB apps, it is much, much easier and more cost effective for us to get at the data ourselves than wait for a db development team in another country to write the forms/reports that we need.

It is precisely this sort of thing that Crystal Reports, Brio and other third party report writers are geared toward and what MS Access is used for quite a lot. ODBC is a wonderful thing, that's why there are standards of compliance.
--
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