In message , John W. Vinson
writes
On Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:20:01 -0700, Steve D
wrote:

Good Afternoon,
I have a very basic question regarding the organization of my table. I
will have monthly data that will be entered and it will be for various years.
Is it better to use one field called month and do a crosstab query or should
I have 12 fields (one for each month)? My thought is that it is cleaner if
each month has its own record but then I will have 12 times the number of
records. Thoughts? Best Practices?

Absolutely and unquestionably, one record per month. "Fields are expensive,
records are cheap"!

In this particular case there's an argument for considering using
columns. The usual reason for preferring rows is that someone might
invent a new foo which would require a new column in a table. I
believe that it's unlikely that anyone is going to add a new month to
the calendar any time soon.

Having said that it's not unknown for company accounts to be split into
thirteen or sometimes more "months." An auditor of my acquaintance
wasn't surprised to find an extra month in a set of accounts. He was
surprised to find that we had given it a name, "Augustus."




--
Bernard Peek