[AccessD] On DB Bloat, Bad DB Design, and various

John W. Colby jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Wed May 26 08:02:48 CDT 2004


Gustav,

I wrote my previous response in haste.

Let me be crystal clear about this.  If you are 100% certain that 50
characters is enough for the field that needs to e entered, and 100% certain
that it won't change in the future, then 50 characters is a FINE field
length.  The same for 20 or 10 characters.  My point has always been that
the client needs to be able to enter the data they need to enter, regardless
of your personal preferences.  There have been "Tough for the user if they
can't" responses which I cannot appreciate.

Again, to be crystal clear...

1) If 50 characters is enough 100% of the time now and in the future, then
it is a PERFECT solution.
2) To run an engineering analysis on what IS the correct length for an
address, vs a first name, vs a city is (in my opinion) a waste of my time.
50 characters is fine, 255 is fine.
3) If 50 is fine, 255 is fine.  I see no gain in restricting it from 255 to
50.
4) This is all a default in Access.  I set it to 255 and forget it (and have
never seen a problem).  If I set it to 50 I now have to at least give a
cursory glance (and more importantly remember that it is set to 50) for
those instances where 50 may not be enough.  It is NOT in your face that you
have just restricted data entry to 50.
5) If I get it wrong I have to boot the users and change it.

These are JUST my preferences.  I have a lot of things to do when designing
a database.  I have never seen any benefit from limiting my field sizes.  I
have numerous times had to go in and open up other peoples limits because
the "carved in stone employeeid" changed lengths etc.

Whatever you do, PLEASE don't tell me I should be limiting the user to 20
characters for an address even if the address can really be bigger (which
has been stated in this thread).

I suppose I shall just have to live with the title "sloppy developer" if
setting and forgetting 255 characters earns me that.  I will take solace in
the fact that I have more time to do more useful things than make educated
guesses and clean up messes.

John W. Colby
www.ColbyConsulting.com

-----Original Message-----
From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com]On Behalf Of Gustav Brock
Sent: Wednesday, May 26, 2004 7:17 AM
To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving
Subject: Re: [AccessD] On DB Bloat, Bad DB Design, and various


Hi John

> I keep asking (and nobody is responding) - whose data is it?  Whose
database
> is it.

In most cases, the client's.

> Who are YOU to TELL the client that 53 characters is all they need?

I'm the expert. Quite often the client doesn't know what he/she needs.
If there would be a good reason to limit a text field to 53 chars, I
would tell or simply apply it.
As some examples, ISO country codes are either two or three chars, BIC
(SWIFT) codes are 8 or 11 chars, and IBAN codes are, by definition,
max. 34 chars - anything above these numbers would represent an error
and would make no sense to store.

Here, no city name is longer than 20 chars and no street name is
longer than 34 chars. Thus 50 is a reasonable limit for domestic
address lines which, by the way, is also what Access's table designer
suggests.

/gustav

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