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

Jürgen Welz jwelz at hotmail.com
Fri May 21 16:02:37 CDT 2004


I'm in an A97 environment today but googled up the following post at a news 
group:

'I've searched the groups trying to find the definitive
answer on how many characters can be stored in a single
record of a table in Access 2K.

Help says 2000, and this seems to be quoted in the
majority of threads I've seen.

So I ran a test. I created a new table added 20 or so 250
char fields, and proceeded to fill them with 240character
strings, expecting to get bounced on number 9.

It eventually gave up after 3956 characters in 17 fields.'


The response said something about unicode compression and code pages, but 
seemed to be a guess.

Perhaps you are misunderstanding.  You may define a table with 255 text 
fields of 255 characters in each field without error.  Just don't let a user 
try to fill them up to the size limit with that number of characters because 
A2K will error.



Ciao
Jürgen Welz
Edmonton, Alberta
jwelz at hotmail.com





>From: "Arthur Fuller" <artful at rogers.com>
>
>Having never heard this before, I created an Access table with 9 text
>(255) fields and successfully added a row. Then I decided to add some
>more fields to the table, all text 255. I quit at 20, where I was able
>to add and edit a row.
>
>This is Access 2002 so your results may differ. In this version, the 2k
>limit is no longer. The database is Access 2000 style, so this must have
>been true then too.
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
>[mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Jürgen Welz
>Sent: Friday, May 21, 2004 2:02 PM
>To: accessd at databaseadvisors.com
>Subject: RE: [AccessD] On DB Bloat, Bad DB Design, and various
>
>
>"Unnecessary" size restrictions on fields ensure that a record can be
>saved.
>   If you have more than 8 text fields at 255 characters per field,
>Access
>will refuse to save the record.  Have you forgotten the the 2k character
>
>limit on record size in mdb files?
>
>Ciao
>Jürgen Welz
>Edmonton, Alberta
>jwelz at hotmail.com
>
>
>
>
>
> >From: DWUTKA at marlow.com
> >
> >Actually I think that talking about Access training/experience is a
> >valid topic.
> >
> >Recently, I have helped a friend with his Access 'homework' from his
> >MIS course.  I worked cheap (for beer <grin>), but it just kills me
> >what they are having students do.  The 'instructions' for the
> >assignments has them naming tables with spaces, setting unnecessary
> >size limitations for text fields, etc.  Just plain ugly.  In fact one
> >instruction was so goofy, I completely bypassed what they were trying
> >to do, and wrote some VBA to have the same result.
> >
> >It is just flat out amazing that the world moves as it does. <grin>
> >
> >Drew

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