Datasheet

Chapter 1

❑ It will allow you to achieve a measurable improvement in performance, with a

minimal increase in administrative overhead, or

❑ It will allow you to achieve a measurable reduction in administrative overhead, with a

minimal degradation of performance

Another aspect of the tblCompany table that required careful consideration was the question

of how to hold address information. Look at the structure of the table. The address information

has been broken down into five fields (Address, City, State, ZipCode, and Country). Why

do you think this has been done, instead of holding the address in a single field? The answer is

that by breaking it into five fields, we make it easier for our users to analyze their orders by

city, state, zip code and country individually. This would be difficult, if not impossible, if the

address were stored in a single field.

Note, however, that only one field is used for the first part of the address (the lines that

precede the city, state, zip code and country).

Address:

37 Walnut Grove

City:

Nutbush

State:

Tennessee

Postcode/Zip Code:

38053

Country: USA

Even though this first part of the address might contain more than one line (especially if the

address contains a building name) we can store it in a single field, because Access allows us to

store and display multi-line values in one field. We store these in one field because they

logically belong together and you shouldn't need to split them up at all. Sometimes you will see

databases with tables that store this part of the address in multiple fields, because the database

cannot easily handle carriage returns as part of the data in a field. That's not a problem with

Access though.

The other advantage with storing the first part of the address in a single field is that it makes it

a lot easier to amend the address. Just imagine if you had stored the above address with a

separate field for every line of the address and then had to change it to: