artful at rogers.com
artful at rogers.com
Fri Aug 4 11:32:40 CDT 2006
No, Drew, JC argued with me and a few others. It's always about You, init? However, my work has taken me increasingly into SQL Server and relatively away from Access, so my former regular forays into the arguments here have grown fewer and fewer as time passes. Now I find myself thinking about SQL 2005 and ERwin to the exclusion of most everything else. But I do miss the arguments here. And speaking of which, I think that I'll proffer a self-contradiction here. Long-time readers may recall my strenuous advocations of autonumbers/identity keys. My most recent two projects have caused me to rethink this position. I am beginning to realize the intelligence underlying the "business keys" approach. That is, given three tables, T1, T2 and T3, arranged hierarchically: T1: PK is, say T1PK. T2: inherits T1PK and adds a new column T2K, the combination being unique. T3: inherits its parent PK (T1PK+T2K) and adds a column that produces unique values. Formerly, I judged this scenario a complete waste of time and space. No longer. I have found myself in situations where sids (surrogate IDs) have pointed to sids -- which is ridiculous! I had to create 20+ joins to get the required data assembled. Intelligent (business) keys made the problem a LOT simpler and the retrieval times a LOT faster, and the only cost was disk space. The app already knew what the parent key values were, so it was trivial to write them to the new child record. The point of this is that for years I have advocated position X, but the last two apps made me rethink it, and for those two apps I chose to go the intelligent key approach instead. Mind you, I was dealing with many millions of rows, so that is a factor in the decision, for sure. Arthur ----- Original Message ---- From: DWUTKA at marlow.com To: accessd at databaseadvisors.com Sent: Friday, August 4, 2006 11:30:50 AM Subject: Re: [AccessD] OT: Friday info Who did you argue with before I joined the list, yourself? <evil grin> Drew -----Original Message----- From: JWColby [mailto:jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com] Sent: Friday, August 04, 2006 9:56 AM To: 'Access Developers discussion and problem solving' Subject: Re: [AccessD] OT: Friday info Rrrrrr, no the answer is 9263. Curiously, 2486 of those arguments occurred after Drew joined the list. Of course 7468 were after JWC joined the list. ;-) John W. Colby Colby Consulting www.ColbyConsulting.com -----Original Message----- From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Hale, Jim Sent: Friday, August 04, 2006 9:28 AM To: 'Access Developers discussion and problem solving' Subject: Re: [AccessD] OT: Friday info and the final Jeopardy answer is "How many times have we argued about bound vs unbound forms?": c. 320 Jim Hale -----Original Message----- From: Susan Harkins [mailto:harkins1 at setel.com] Sent: Friday, August 04, 2006 8:18 AM To: 'Access Developers discussion and problem solving' Subject: Re: [AccessD] OT: Friday info a. 182 b. 233 c. 320 320 -- AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com *********************************************************************** The information transmitted is intended solely for the individual or entity to which it is addressed and may contain confidential and/or privileged material. Any review, retransmission, dissemination or other use of or taking action in reliance upon this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited. If you have received this email in error please contact the sender and delete the material from any computer. As a recipient of this email, you are responsible for screening its contents and the contents of any attachments for the presence of viruses. No liability is accepted for any damages caused by any virus transmitted by this email. -- AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com -- AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com -- AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com