Data Rules Violations

[John Quinn]

I have a table of 19,000 records with about 225 fields in each record. It is
not an indexed table, just a table of educational transactions.

Some how when I go to update the historical table seven (7) records have
gotten some bad info in them. I know I can copy the table to another
database and look at them one field at a time, but this will take forever.

Does anyone know a quick method of finding the seven bad records?

Thanks in Advance

John Q

 

[John... Visio MVP]

I have a table of 19,000 records with about 225 fields in each record. It
is
not an indexed table, just a table of educational transactions.

Some how when I go to update the historical table seven (7) records have
gotten some bad info in them. I know I can copy the table to another
database and look at them one field at a time, but this will take forever.

Does anyone know a quick method of finding the seven bad records?

Thanks in Advance

John Q

It depends how you define bad. If you have a criteria, then you can write a
query to ientify those "bad" records.

John... Visio MVP

 

[Steve]

Hello John,

When a table has 225 fields, it is a certainty that your database tables are
misdesigned. This is a substantail problem that needs solved.

What constitutes a bad record? You can find the seven bad records with an
appropriate query.

Steve
(e-mail address removed)

 

[KARL DEWEY]

I have a table of 19,000 records with about 225 fields in each record.
It sounds like you have a spreadsheet like Excel instead of a relational
database that is the intended purpose of Access.
If your data was 'normalized' then it might be easier to find something.

 

[Jeff Boyce]

John

What "historical table"? If it truly is historical info only, why are you
"updating" it?

How do you know that there are 7?

Do you know which field(s) contain the bad info?

Does "bad" = corrupted, or does "bad" = inaccurate?

More info, please...

Regards

Jeff Boyce
Microsoft Access MVP

--
Disclaimer: This author may have received products and services mentioned
in this post. Mention and/or description of a product or service herein
does not constitute endorsement thereof.

Any code or pseudocode included in this post is offered "as is", with no
guarantee as to suitability.

You can thank the FTC of the USA for making this disclaimer
possible/necessary.

 

[J_Goddard via AccessMonster.com]

Hi -

How did you determine that 7 records had 'bad' data? Did MS Access give you
an error message on a
data import, or did you just happen to notice the bad data? If the 'bad'
data is actually in the tables, then it is not likely to be a problem with MS
Access - more likely to be a problem with the source of the data.

As has been pointed out, 225 fields is a REALLY large table - can you give us
an idea of what it contains? It might be that there is a much more efficient
way of reaching your goal.

John

 

[John... Visio MVP]

Copying my answers again? Do you ever have an original thought?

John... Visio MVP

 

[John Quinn]

Sorry Staeve;

Every field depends on the previous field. If I designed
a table for each scenario, I would have about 200 tables being linked to I do
not know how many other tables. Testing applications have become very
difficult and are now one of the toughest applications to design. Microsoft
consultants were at the Texas headquarters because so many people have had
comments like yours.

Did could not come up with a better design either. It cost
the State of Texas $275,000.00 to do almost exactly what we did.

Some applications do not coincide with Microsoft's or IBM
rules!

Thanks for getting back however!

John Q

 

[John Quinn]

The legal community for the Department of Education is now requiring a weekly
account of all the students we test and grade. I move the infor to the SQL
database in the event of a law suit by the parents.

Thanks for getting back!

Hope this gives you an understanding of what we face in education.

John Q.

 

[John Quinn]

It is a sequence of information and approvals for each subject, grade,
homework and tests.

If a student is taking English then we need to show all scorces given and
the relationship to the previous grad or score. With each entry you must
always carrt fields of data for who reviewed it, approved it, made
suggestions or rejected the educational technique used. There is also a
comparison made to grades when the student goes into the next level of
education. For example from grade school to middles school, from middle
school to junior high and from junior high to college.

We even have to know that the student entered college and if that student
graduated or not.

The designers at Fort Hood, indicated iot was the toughest applications they
have ever seen. Microsoft consultants were amazed at what the attorney's in
Washington DC want us to keep an accounting of.

The bad data message comes from an append query. The tables are suppose to
be identical but for some reason this happens once in a while. I eventually
find out where the problem is, but it takes so long.

Thanks for the interest.

John Q.

 

[Jeff Boyce]

Sorry, I didn't see answers to the questions ... I asked them to get
clarification.

Regards

Jeff Boyce
Microsoft Access MVP

--
Disclaimer: This author may have received products and services mentioned
in this post. Mention and/or description of a product or service herein
does not constitute endorsement thereof.

Any code or pseudocode included in this post is offered "as is", with no
guarantee as to suitability.

You can thank the FTC of the USA for making this disclaimer
possible/necessary.

 

[J_Goddard via AccessMonster.com]

If any one of the records in the table pertain to more than one subject, then
it is not properly normalized (i.e. designed). If you have groups of fields
that repeat, for example grade1, source1, approval1, grade2, source2,
approval2.... then it is not normalized at all.

Looking at your description (if I read it right, that all this is in one
table), then you do have that situation: for each student, in each subject,
there are many scores. The scores in turn have fields for reviewer, approval,
suggestions,.... Given this, "Scores" requires its own table, with a PK of
Student_ID, Subject_ID, Score_ID, plus all the other data.

They may well be more tables that would result if you do the complete
normalization process, and the complexity might (and that's a big *might*!)
not be as much as you think.

HTH

John

It is a sequence of information and approvals for each subject, grade,
homework and tests.

If a student is taking English then we need to show all scorces given and
the relationship to the previous grad or score. With each entry you must
always carrt fields of data for who reviewed it, approved it, made
suggestions or rejected the educational technique used. There is also a
comparison made to grades when the student goes into the next level of
education. For example from grade school to middles school, from middle
school to junior high and from junior high to college.

We even have to know that the student entered college and if that student
graduated or not.

The designers at Fort Hood, indicated iot was the toughest applications they
have ever seen. Microsoft consultants were amazed at what the attorney's in
Washington DC want us to keep an accounting of.

The bad data message comes from an append query. The tables are suppose to
be identical but for some reason this happens once in a while. I eventually
find out where the problem is, but it takes so long.

Thanks for the interest.

John Q.

Hi -

[quoted text clipped - 22 lines]

 

[Jeff Boyce]

You may be asking yourself why would you care? Why bother with
"normalization"?

MS Access is a relational database. It's features and functions are
optimized for well-normalized data. If you try to feed it 'sheet data, both
you and Access will have to work overtime to overcome that 'sheet data
structure.

Good luck!

Regards

Jeff Boyce
Microsoft Access MVP

--
Disclaimer: This author may have received products and services mentioned
in this post. Mention and/or description of a product or service herein
does not constitute endorsement thereof.

Any code or pseudocode included in this post is offered "as is", with no
guarantee as to suitability.

You can thank the FTC of the USA for making this disclaimer
possible/necessary.

If any one of the records in the table pertain to more than one subject,
then
it is not properly normalized (i.e. designed). If you have groups of
fields
that repeat, for example grade1, source1, approval1, grade2, source2,
approval2.... then it is not normalized at all.

Looking at your description (if I read it right, that all this is in one
table), then you do have that situation: for each student, in each
subject,
there are many scores. The scores in turn have fields for reviewer,
approval,
suggestions,.... Given this, "Scores" requires its own table, with a PK
of
Student_ID, Subject_ID, Score_ID, plus all the other data.

They may well be more tables that would result if you do the complete
normalization process, and the complexity might (and that's a big
*might*!)
not be as much as you think.

HTH

John

It is a sequence of information and approvals for each subject, grade,
homework and tests.

If a student is taking English then we need to show all scorces given and
the relationship to the previous grad or score. With each entry you must
always carrt fields of data for who reviewed it, approved it, made
suggestions or rejected the educational technique used. There is also a
comparison made to grades when the student goes into the next level of
education. For example from grade school to middles school, from middle
school to junior high and from junior high to college.

We even have to know that the student entered college and if that student
graduated or not.

The designers at Fort Hood, indicated iot was the toughest applications
they
have ever seen. Microsoft consultants were amazed at what the attorney's
in
Washington DC want us to keep an accounting of.

The bad data message comes from an append query. The tables are suppose
to
be identical but for some reason this happens once in a while. I
eventually
find out where the problem is, but it takes so long.

Thanks for the interest.

John Q.

Hi -

[quoted text clipped - 22 lines]

John Q

 

[Steve]

John,

From your description here, your application is not so tough (complex maybe
and requiring many tables). What makes your application problematic is the
table with 225 fields. When you run the append query, something is highly
likely to go wrong at some point in time due to the complexity of the data
in the 225 field table. Your tables need to be normalized. What you will
probably end up with are a set of less than fifty tables where all tables
are less than ten fields.

Based on your description here, you have students who progress through
grades 1 to 12 and some may go on to college. In each grade they take
certain subjects. In each subject in each grade they do homework and take
tests. The students are given grades for their homework and tests.
Apparently there is some review and approval process. Comparison of grades
when the student goes into the next level of
education is a simple query or series of queries. The data returned by any
query can be displayed on the screen in a form or printed out in a report.

You say when a problem occurs you eventually find out where the problem is,
but it takes so long. There's a very strong possibility that a well designed
set of tables would eliminate the problem you are seeing. Even if it doesn't
totally eliminate the problem, when a problem occurred, it would take far
less time to find where the problem is.

Steve
(e-mail address removed)