Re: A philosophical newbie issue: catch redundant errors via relationships or programmically?
Date: Tue, 1 Jan 2008 13:29:00 -0000
Message-ID: <477a401b$0$13932$fa0fcedb_at_news.zen.co.uk>
"raylopez99" <raylopez99_at_yahoo.com> wrote in message news:788634eb-c652-4a03-bddd-17e4e409aeb8_at_j20g2000hsi.googlegroups.com... On Dec 30, 10:40 am, mAsterdam <mAster..._at_vrijdag.org> wrote:
> LOL. Access is great for rapid coding at the GUI level--you should
> see what I've come up with in only a few days, but it's kludgey trying
> to debug stuff.
It's merely a question of knowing what you are doing. It takes many months (if not a year or more) to really get to grips with Access. The fact that it is bundled in with Office, and Microsoft pushes it as an end-user tool, explains why there are so many garbage Access applications around.
> BTW, I notice a tension between not just front end GUI and back end dB
> schema people, but between putting data traps and data crunching code
> in the GUI front end versus writing a SQL query or otherwise dealing
> with the data in the back end. In fact, some people (the posters at
> microsoft . public . access . formscoding and elsewhere) imply and
> state that it's better to deal with this stuff at the front end, since
> SQL "puts too much load onto the servers" (or in particular Access), a
> preformance issue, while others, I suspect you guys, think that the
> front end technique is too much of a maintenance problem or is bad
> design.
That's rubbish about it being a performance issue. If you build an all-Access application then you have to do a certain amount of stuff in the front-end because the Jet engine's support for constraints is limited compared to most server database engines and it has *no* support for triggers. But, if you use Access as a front-end to SQL Server (or some other server database engine), then the same applies as with any other tool you might use for developing the user interface: to do it properly, you do it in the database engine. In fact, I generally duplicate a lot of validation and integrity checking: wherever possible I do it in the front-end to save server round trips (what's the point in submitting an update to the server if you are already in a position to know it's invalid?), but I do it again at the server because that's the only idiot-proof way to guarantee data integrity. Received on Tue Jan 01 2008 - 14:29:00 CET