DWUTKA at marlow.com
DWUTKA at marlow.com
Tue Feb 3 16:05:16 CST 2004
Nothing personal, but I have to agree with Gustav's point of view. I can see (and I believe he does too), where a table would help certain situations. However, I know first hand, the extreme lack of understanding on how a date works. I'm not saying you don't understand that, however, to a computer, it is MUCH faster for many functions, to just let the processor do a logic operation on a number, then to have it pull other data up, and compare that. Holidays, etc, those require heavier logic, so a table could be faster (depending on the amount of data). I'm not knocking your approach. But in my experience, I have never needed to do anything like that. We better be careful that this doesn't turn into another bound/unbound issue. Drew -----Original Message----- From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com]On Behalf Of Robert L. Stewart Sent: Tuesday, February 03, 2004 1:24 PM To: accessd at databaseadvisors.com Cc: hoopesg at hotmail.com Subject: [AccessD] Re: DatePart Question Ahh Grasshopper, And how will you learn if you do not create it? I mean, I could send it to you, or post the table to the files section, but that would not help you or anyone else understand the use of the functions that went in to create it. I teach an MS Access Developer's Workshop and have been doing that for about 8 years. One of the things I do in there is come up with an idea for a function, process, etc. and have them as a group build it. And about the holiday and fiscal year "modifications," since I leave that up to the user to define after the table is created, there are not really any modifications to make to the data for me. Now, having said all of that, I did send the MDB to John Colby, but that was primarily because I know he could have created it in his sleep and because he has shared he work rather freely with us and the Access development world in general. And, it is not reinventing the wheel. It is learning how to build a wheel so you can build the cart that goes with the wheel. ;-) Besides, you may build it quite differently from the way I do it or the way John would do it. Here is another example of "thinking outside of the box." How do you do entry for addresses? Well, I use a table of Zip codes. From that, I get the city and state. So they enter the zip code first and then they may have to select the correct city but the state will always be correct. I use a data-limited combobox for the city so that, for example, they can select one of the 4 "towns" that use 77418 (my zip code). I also default each of the limited comboboxes to the first value in their list, so if there is only one city (77002, Houston) in the list, they do not have to do anything else, thus saving many keystrokes. Actually, you would get both Jan 2004 and Jan 2003, etc. data because it is looking at only the month with what you were looking at doing. What I do is give the user a form for selecting a beginning month, beginning year, ending month, and ending year for reports. If they leave the month off, I only look at the year. If they only give the beginning month and year, I do a year-to-date. And so on. Since I dynamically build the where clause of the SQL statement, I just implement it as a business rule and explain to the users how their entries will power the criteria for their reports. The end result is that the Date Dimension table will give you a lot of control and flexibility in being able to gather criteria and validating it. Robert At 03:46 AM 2/3/2004 -0600, you wrote: >Date: Mon, 02 Feb 2004 12:12:19 -0600 >From: "Gina Hoopes" <hoopesg at hotmail.com> >Subject: [AccessD] Re: DatePart Question >To: accessd at databaseadvisors.com >Message-ID: <Sea1-F130hhDpB8ZdL300037f77 at hotmail.com> >Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed > >Thanks to you and to Gustav for giving me more good ideas. I guess your >question kind of goes back to my original one. If it looks at the whole >date before giving me the "1" for the month, then I'll get Jan 05 data >rather than Jan 04 data. I guess the question is senseless since both Joe >and Gustav have given me good alternatives, but I may still have to plug >some fake data just to see what I get back. > >I have been following the dates table discussion and I've got another >(stupid) question. Except for fiscal years and holiday schedule >modifications, is this not the type of table that one of the people who has >already spent the time to create it could just put out for everyone to use? >I'm afraid I started following the discussion a bit late, so maybe I missed >something. It's not that I mind a day spent creating something really >useful, it just seems a bit like re-inventing the wheel. > >Gina _______________________________________________ AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com