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Rules for ad hoc DB building?

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by paymeister 1 view

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I am a self-taught Access programmer wannabe, and so far have been able to cobble together anything anyone has wanted, for later-the-same-day answers to questions and crisis managment. (For a couple of months, I processed all the time for ~6K hourlies when the proper interface broke down, for example.)

But I want to get beyond the "hack-and-slash" work that I've been doing. I want to produce databases that I can be proud of, rather than spaghetti that even *I* can't understand a few weeks later.

Does anyone have a list of cardinal rules I should consider as I build these databases? I am thinking of "The 10 Commandments for Access", for instance. The critical issue, though, is that I usually am supposed to deliver the finished work within a couple of hours or days of the request: I have to be done before I could even fill out the paperwork requesting a full "business benefits and impacts" study, much less the six months of committee work and VP sponsorship! Any ideas?

Wanting to become a REAL programmer,

-Tim

3 replies

by awfernald

I can think of a few simple rules....

1. Document your work
2. Document your modules i.e. if you create a module where input x, y, z data, and output i value, then give the appropriate values of x, y, z and the possible value types of i.
3. Create a process workflow and table diagram so that people can see how and where the data flows, and also where the data is stored.
4. Document your primary keys/indexes and why they are what they are and what other processes are dependent on them.
5. Document dependencies
6. standardize your variables

by paymeister

Very helpful post - I'll be using your list as the framework to build my "master list"!

But I don't know that I understand "Document dependencies" - perhaps that means that Query3 pulls from Query2 pulls from Query1?

And "standardize your variables" - would this be akin to the naming conventions? I am already trying to do that with tables and queries ("tblPEOPLE" and "qryNIGHTSHIFT", for example).

Thanks a bunch -

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