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Multi-Valued Data Fields ..Spawn of Satan ?
by David Crowson at 13:48 18/07/06 (Blogs::Dave)
I believe so.....

Another good reason to avoid Microsoft Access like the plague....

Will they never learn......

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bombholio
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Multi-Valued Data Fields ..Spawn of Satan ? David Crowson - 13:48 18/07/06
Re: Multi-Valued Data Fields ..Spawn of Satan ? Bruce Ure - 14:02 18/07/06
The most astonishing thing about this to me is that despite the fact that underneath the friendly single-'table' view lies a trio of tables as you'd find with any many-to-many relationship, but when you go to manipulate them at the developer level you find... a single table.

I can't belieeeeeeve they've done it like this. I can see the reasoning behind wrapping up three-table joins in a friendly way, but not exposing the guts of it is just crazy.

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Re: Multi-Valued Data Fields ..Spawn of Satan ? Bruce Ure - 14:05 18/07/06
s/relationship, but when/relationship, when/

(Mods: I thought I could edit my own posts everywhere. Can that be enabled?)

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Re: Multi-Valued Data Fields ..Spawn of Satan ? Simon - 17:22 18/07/06
You can only rewrite history in areas where you have ownership ('editor' rights) for now, but adding the ability to allow trusted people to be revisionists will come along at some point.
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simon
Re: Multi-Valued Data Fields ..Spawn of Satan ? Hugo van der Sanden - 14:30 18/07/06
Interesting - I have for a while been planning to do exactly the same within Novacaster, to add support for an object to have a "collection" field inside it (supporting set, bag and maybe ordered set and array) which would be implemented as multiple tables under the hood.

The main value from my point of view is that this can be used to reduce code complexity, and thus (hopefully) to reduce both development and maintenance costs. I do understand that this should be used sparingly though - the primary target is for client-specific custom objects, which want to have the supporting code as small and localised as possible. This is fresh in my mind, because a potential new client we talked to yesterday appears to have precisely this requirement.

This is only for the object view though - the 'relational' side of the object-relational mapping will not have its view restricted, so full access to the underlying tables will be maintained.

Hugo

Re: Multi-Valued Data Fields ..Spawn of Satan ? Jonathan Tuppeny - 20:18 18/07/06
Basically I think they've just run out of ideas. Between the last two versions of Access there was absolutely sod-all difference. Of course they could fix the bugs but no-one would buy the latest version just for that!

For me this makes very little difference - I'll just carry on using the bits that work.

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jht

Re: Multi-Valued Data Fields ..Spawn of Satan ? Gordon Hundley - 04:59 21/07/06
I've been using the bits that work in spreadsheets since VisiCalc. The downside is that it takes more than the 16K that it used to. But this is part of the evil scheme. Multi-valued data fields will aid "knowledge discovery" operations, which will in turn put system requirements through the roof, and maybe sell the first Itanium processor outside the supply chain.

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DrGoon