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Old February 26th, 2010, 07:39 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"

David,

Your comment “When table modifications call for lots of new fields it often
means that a one-to-many relationship that ought to be set up in
multiple tables is being shoe-horned into a single table.”

It also means that you have to alter your front-end forms and
reports by adding all the fields, whereas if you're adding records
instead, whatever continuous or datasheet form you're using to
display those records will just have more records in it, so there is
no need to alter then user interface objects.

Response: I don’t understand you comment. It is absolutely that that is I
add more records, I don’t’ have altered anything. But when the user asks
where to they enter these new fields and where the new reports are, what am I
suppose to say. Well, I did not do add those fields but you can enter more
data? That makes no sense at all.

I’ve yet to figure how to capture additional data and produce reports with
this additional data without modifying the UI or creating the new reports.
Sorry, I have no idea what you mean by the above statement.

Your comment: To *me*, that's what the phrase means, that adding fields is
more complicated in terms of UI, which, to be frank, is where 90% of our time
is spent in the development process (rather than in schema design/changes).

My response: You are preaching to the choir! I fully agree.

However, this project started out a simple membership mailing list. And
that is all it was. Once the users saw it working, their imagination went
wild and they wanted to start capturing additional information so they could
produce additional reports.

When this project started, I knew about the other report and strongly
suggested that they just capture the additional fields and produce all of the
report. However, the users kept saying no, no, no we don’t need at that
stuff. The process is working just fine. And the boss man said – just do the
mailing labels and that all. So that is what I did. I designed it for the
full requirements, but only implemented the mailing label piece.

But what are you supposed to do when the user, who is paying you, say no we
don’t need that when you know that are going to need it? You can only push
the customer so far.

But again, none of this had anything to do with the original disk access
speed vs. Access internal process speed question.


Dennis