normalize/analyze multiple databases

[Monica]

I had a question posed to me yesterday by someone in another deparment. I
work in the IS department and just started working on ACCESS databases for my
company. This is what they want to do: They have 100 + ACCESS databases, many
of them contain duplicate tables and fields. They want to analyze these
databases and have only one or two repository databaes instead of 100 +. Is
there a software program out there that will analyze many ACCESS databases as
one time and give a report on tables, fields, queires, macros etc? Thanks in
advance

 

[Roger Carlson]

I'm not sure that it would do you any good. How would a software package
know if the Customers table in one database represented the same thing as
the Customers table in another? Same is true of fields and queries and so
forth. It might work if all of these databases were created consistantly,
but then if they were, you probably would need to do this in the first
place.

Sometimes there is no substitute for human judgement.

--
--Roger Carlson
MS Access MVP
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[Monica]

Thanks for your response. I did not think this was a possibility, just had to
put it out to confirm my thoughts on it. Have a good friday!

 

[Jerry Whittle]

I've been through a similar exercise. People, including myself, created many
databases to do their jobs either because there was no other tool available
or the big company database was inaccurate, not user friendly, and/or took
years to get changed. These on-the-fly databases ranged from brilliant (like
mine ;-) ) to perfectly awful.

What the company finally did was a top-down review of needs and
requirements. Then they built, actually still building, a new industrial
strength database which would do what the users needed. It was painful and
there were lot of territory and loss of ownership issues but it was starting
to bear fruit before I left that company.

 

[mnature]

Just for your information, it could be somewhat helpful to print out the
relationships of these databases, in order to help with starting to sort them
out. You can also use Visio Professional to print out tables and queries
from a database, and the way that queries are set up can also help to sort
out what you have.

Sounds like a really messy and long process that your company is starting.
Hope they realize how long it will take to normalize everything.