[AccessD] Lookup Fields in Table Design

Hi Drew,
Don't misunderstand me, your points are well taken, and you have my utmost
respect as a developer/programmer.

Corruption is just a hot spot on my psyche. If I knew HOW it was caused it
would be different and that's the issue - apparently no one (including M$)
does or they would prevent it. Even when considering that M$ allows some
things to happen/not happen as a bone thrown to its third party developers,
no one has a corruption fixing utility that works and is making money off
of.

"Data goes into black box - gets corrupted - data doesn't come out of black
box."

That's actually my biggest concern with Access. The absolute (publicly)
undocumented proprietary nature of it. Sometimes I think the (publicly) can
be left out of the statement.

I'm actually quite surprised by the results of this little debate.  Ken,
Charlotte, Dev, Lebans and others all warn against it. I think the question
I posed here to Susan concerning lookups originally came to mind about 5
years ago when I saw it on Dev's website under the "ten rules". I don't
follow "rules" - when I see the word "rule" my mind automatically translates
it to "strong guideline", but it made me curious. Like I said I don't
generally use lookups, I have, and I will if the situation calls for them
again.



-----Original Message-----
From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com]On Behalf Of
DWUTKA at marlow.com
Sent: Friday, March 26, 2004 1:17 AM
To: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com; accessd at databaseadvisors.com
Subject: RE: [AccessD] Lookup Fields in Table Design


John, the points are cute, but the problem is that Lookup fields do NOT
cause corruption.  He said they made it more difficult to fix.  There are a
TON of things (that everyone uses) that make repairing corruption more
difficult.  Essentially, if you make a blank database, and put it on CD, you
stand the best chances of recovering that database when it's completely
blank, and never used.  Once you start adding data, code, objecs, etc, you
are adding things which can complicate a recovery.  So it's a no pointer /
moot point, to say that lookup's made a particular recovery difficult.  If
there had been a bit of error handling code, which got in the way of
recovering a database, would you say 'I'll never use Error Handling code,
because it made my life difficult once'?

I didn't think so.

Drew