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COPYRIGHT 2005 VNU Business Media Europe
Byline: Mark Whitehorn.
In the September issue I answered a question from Nigel Williams about his club membership database. It is composed of a table called Address and another called People. In order to generate a report, Nigel specifically asked for a query that generated a single record for each address that showed all the individuals from that location (see screen 1).
If you have bought the DVD version of PCW, you'll find the query and all the sample files for this column on the cover disc.
As I said at the time, this solution is perfectly appropriate for a small database where the developer and user are one and the same. However, I also said that I couldn't really recommend it for a mission-critical 24/7 pan-galactic database.
Tim Lewcock (among others) has written to ask how I would have solved it for a larger system.
My only problem with the original solution is that the very structure of the query is placing restrictions on the data that can be displayed - it can't cope with families that have more than four members. If you suddenly discover that you have a family with five members, you have to redesign the query just to suit that family. Then, three months later, a family with six members joins...
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