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Old February 26th, 2010, 07:53 AM posted to microsoft.public.access.tablesdbdesign
Dennis
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Posts: 1,222
Default I was told "Fields are expensive, records are cheap"


Duane Hookom

Your comment: I made the comment: I took over a survey application at a
hospital from a programmer with many more years of programming than I had at
the time.

Your response: I don’t understand what this comment has to do with the
subject.

This was all based on your statement regarding your "over 30 years
experience with relational databased".

Years of experience are not always the same as understanding and knowledge.
In your case, your knowledge may be much greater than 30 years. I'm not sure
how we would know that.

I was simply providing an example suggesting that I have followed developers
who had many years of experience without a basic understanding of properly
structured tables. In no way was I suggesting you don't understand
normalization.


My response: Ah, you are preaching to the choir. My apologizes. I fully
understand what you are saying. It is very true that experience does not
always count for much. I too have come behind very experience people and had
to clean up the mess and convoluted logic. And as I said, I know that I’ve
had off weeks and left messes behind for someone else to clean up, much to my
embarrassment.

I’ve also had programmer with only a year or so of experience, but with a
fresh out look, come up with some very creative and elegant solutions (which
I doubt I would have arrived at). I’ve done that same thing when I’ve gone
to a new project with much more senior people. Sometimes that can not see the
forest for the trees.


Dennis