To my way of thinking, there are two types of tables. Entity Tables and Transaction Tables. It is important to understand the difference. Entity Describes an entity and its attributes. Customers are entities, Products are entities. You can edit an entity’s attributes. I always like to use a Log table that takes a copy of… Read More »
The Access Query Designer does some great stuff but what it won’t do is an Outer Join. What is an Outer Join? If we have two tables, in this example Sales and Orders and we want to see a full list of customers who have placed Either an Order or a Sale and also see… Read More »
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In its simplest form, an Access Application, or indeed any database application is made up of two components, Data and User Interface (UI). This is referred to as a Client Server architecture where the Data, otherwise known as the Backend (BE), is situated on a Server where it can be shared by all users (although… Read More »
A relational database allows you to ‘normalise’ your data. Normalising data means that you only have to store repeated information in one place. For example, if you are storing invoice data then each invoice for the same Customer does not need to store the address of the customer, this is held in a Customer table… Read More »
Microsoft Access provides two main functions. Firstly it is a database container, capable of storing your data. Secondly it is an application development tool which enables you to create forms and reports that make use of your data by presenting it to the user. In fact Access is considered a Rapid Application Development (RAD) tool. It’s… Read More »
An Access Database is a container. Within this container are collections of objects which include tables, queries, forms and reports. Objects can themselves be containers. For example a table contains columns (or fields) while forms and reports contain controls that display data. So we could iterate through our database’s Tables (TableDefs) and through each Table’s Fields like this… Read More »
When Naming Objects, The first purpose of Naming Conventions is to ensure that the names of objects are unique. Access may allow you to give the same name as a table to a form or report (but not a query) but that doesn’t mean you should. At some point you may need to rename an object… Read More »
If you add, or edit, records in a Form then any Combo or List box based on that form’s Datasource is no longer up to date. I’ve seen many attempts to handle this and most are very clunky, others difficult to maintain. What we should be doing is requerying all the Lists in our Application when,… Read More »
The Software Development Life Cycle outlines the process for successful software development. The concepts of SDLC are part of Project Management, regardless of what PM strategy you use. This cycle may be a day or a year but in its most simplified form The Cycle looks like – Specify > Develop > Test and Document >… Read More »