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Old February 25th, 2010, 01:34 AM posted to microsoft.public.access.tablesdbdesign
Jeff Boyce
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Posts: 8,621
Default I was told "Fields are expensive, records are cheap"

Rick already responded to your questions ... but I'll add some additional
consideration ...

If your application involved only one table, and one query, and one form,
and one report, and one procedure, when you changed that table from 30
fields to 60, didn't you also have to modify (i.e., maintain) your query,
your form, your report, and your procedure?

Imagine how much maintenance there'd be if you needed to change it again?!
.... or if you had more than one of each.

On the other hand, if what you are using multiple fields to store (hint:
this is a spreadsheetly way to organize the data) were "repeating values"
( a prime example is mmm-yy ... as a field name, to store numbers for a
given month and year), then you could modify your table structure to hold:

tblTable
TableID
YourNumber
YourDateTime

With this design, any time you need to add a new month/year, you don't add
another field, you add another record. This is where the "tall not wide"
comes from...

Good luck!

Regards

Jeff Boyce
Microsoft Access MVP

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Disclaimer: This author may have received products and services mentioned
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does not constitute endorsement thereof.

Any code or pseudocode included in this post is offered "as is", with no
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possible/necessary.

"Dennis" wrote in message
...
Hi,

I just have a self education question.

In response to one of my questions I stated that I added a lot of fields
(a
lot was 30 fields) to my table. The initial implementation was so
successful, the user requested quite a few more enhancements resulting in
the
addition of 30 additional fields.

One MVP who responded stated "Fields are expensive, records are cheap".
I'm
currious about his statement. I'm new to Access (less than a year) but I
have over 30 years experience with relational databased on multiple
platforms. I've always been taught the exact opposite - that "Fields are
cheap, records are expensive" since going to disk is so slow versus
accessing
data in memory.

Is there something different about Access where the statement "Fields are
expense, records are cheap" is true. I'm using Access on local machine
where
the front and backs end reside on the same machine as well as having
multiple
front ends on each client's machine tied into the back end which resides
on
a file server. We have a hardwired ethernet cat5 cable network.

Dennis