View Single Post
  #34  
Old March 1st, 2010, 04:21 AM posted to microsoft.public.access.tablesdbdesign
David W. Fenton
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 3,373
Default I was told "Fields are expensive, records are cheap"

=?Utf-8?B?RGVubmlz?= wrote in
:

I misunderstood his remark to mean that it was better for Access
to have two smaller records in a 1:1 relationship than it was to
have one large record.


That was a pretty perverse reading of it. As I think you now
understand, the statement was about normalization, that a large
record very often has repeating data where each instance of the
repeating field should be a record in a separate table rather than a
field in the main table.

And the reason for this is not as much data retrieval performance
(though it is often more efficient to retrieve data from a single
field in another table than it is to query multiple fields in a
single table; not to mention multiple index maintenance vs. a single
index to maintain) as it was the cost in terms of front-end design.

I don't think it was reasonable at any point to think the 1:1 design
was being promoted by anyone.

--
David W. Fenton http://www.dfenton.com/
usenet at dfenton dot com http://www.dfenton.com/DFA/