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

Gustav Brock gustav at cactus.dk
Wed Jun 2 08:57:39 CDT 2004


Hi all

Strange.

Yesterday a client called us to "fix" an accounting system (not made
by us).

The requested fix: Allow for transactions' descriptions to be longer
than 50.
I suggested 250. "That's fine! We need only about 140 or so."

The number 140 was purely empirical. I sat it to 255.
Five tables needed redesign. Four forms and two reports too.

/gustav


> Hi Stuart

> well, you and several contributors to this thread - with Arthur
> and Scott as the bright exceptions - should join a club of weeping
> school girls. Now come on and get professional as is the general
> attitude of our fellow listers.

> If you design an app wrongly, you'll of course have to fix it; if some
> standard is changed, say postal codes for a country goes from x to y
> format and you couldn't know, the client has to pay. If your app is
> out in big numbers, you would offer an update.

> Since when has distributing an update been a problem?

> /gustav


>> On 25 May 2004 at 7:45, Scott Marcus wrote:

>>> 
>>> Someone else mentioned not limiting fields to 2 letters for state
>>> abbreviations. Why not? When the abbreviations jump to 3 letters, I'll
>>> make the field bigger. That's just part of my job. 
>>> 

>> And who pays for that work to be done?

>> Do you  stick the client with a bill for a modification that 
>> shouldn't have been needed or do you wear the cost of the time 
>> yourself.

>> What if you've got the same app rolled out in lot's of different 
>> places. It can get quite expensive to provide updates to all the 
>> sites.




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