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

I've been watching this thread for a while now, and need to ask this
question to Drew and JC:

If you always allow 255 characters for your text fields, do you format your
forms and reports to display that size of data?

Drew, you talk about being "burned by these limitations".  It would seem to
me that if your report's fields are not wide enough and truncate the field
contents, you have effectively imposed that limitation.  However, you have
done it in a much more insidious way, by allowing the user to type in a long
string and then not displaying its full contents in the output.  This
seriously breaks one of my cardinal design rules of accepting user input
that the system is not able to process.

Of course, I'm assuming that you don't display all 255 characters.  If my
assumption is wrong and you actually do leave enough room for all 255,
doesn't this result in pretty weird looking tabular reports?  How many 255
character fields can you fit across an 8 1/2 X 11" piece of paper?  1?  2
perhaps?

Have you ever encountered users that misuse the fields?  I have (in almost
every company I've worked for).  Doesn't allowing the entry of 255
characters in any text field (say Address 2) invite the careless user to
treat it as the Memo field they forgot to ask for?

Seems like sloppy programming to me.  And very surprising comments from
developers who preach about following good data modeling practices.


-----Original Message-----
From: DWUTKA at marlow.com [mailto:DWUTKA at marlow.com] 
Sent: Friday, May 21, 2004 1:54 PM
To: accessd at databaseadvisors.com
Subject: RE: [AccessD] On DB Bloat, Bad DB Design, and various


I think we are talking apples and oranges here.  Yes, the page file size
needs to be taken into consideration.  I set all of my text fields to 255. I
do this because I don't want to be backed into a wall, because I set a size
limit that prevents a user from entering what they need to enter.  If I
provide a phone number field, and set it to 10 (area code and phone number),
sure, I am 'limiting' the client.  However, what happens when they want to
put in an international number.  Or if the US decides to move to 8 digit
phone numbers.  Who knows, there are all sorts of reasons that the field
size may change.  Now, if I have some sort of logic checking data integrity,
that would have to be changed, but if I don't, by having the field size set
to 10, I am limiting the users at the table level, to a point where they
cannot do their job.  If I have it set to 255, I am 99.99999% they would
never put 255 characters into that field, but they may put in 11, or 12,
etc.  

Oh well, this really isnt' something I feel like arguing about.  I see your
point Jürgen, but this is really a case of who has been burned and how.  I
have been burned over and over by previous developers putting such
limitations into their databases.  I have never been burned by the page file
size.  In fact, I completely forgot that the limit even existed, until it
popped up on the list a few weeks ago.  So that is why I set my default text
field size to 255.

Drew


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