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From: MJ on 30 Apr 2010 17:47
John,

You make a valid point, were this updatable data I would be concerned about
duplication, but it exactly as you said a "snapshot" in time results
reporting, which is broken out and distrributed to users for worklists.

Thank you for your observations, please keep them coming, it is a learning
process.

--

MJ


"John W. Vinson" wrote:

> On Fri, 30 Apr 2010 09:31:01 -0700, MJ <MJ(a)discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:
>
> >I am sure that someone has asked this at one time or another, but haven't
> >found it out here yet.
> >
> >I have several inter-related databases, some of them have linked tables
> >while others have queries appending to tables which they are not linked to.
> >
> >What is a good rule of thumb for when it makes better sense to link to a
> >table rather than simply appending to a table? What are the PROs and CONs?
> >
> >Thank you in advance for your informed inputs.
>
> If by appending you mean that you're copying data from one database into new
> records in a table in another database, just be aware that you now have *the
> same* data stored in two different places. This is called Redundancy, and it's
> generally considered a bad thing to do!
>
> Suppose you append some data from BigJoe.mdb into Mylocal.mdb. The guy in
> charge of BigJoe realizes that some of this data is incorrect, and goes in and
> corrects the errors.
>
> You now have two copies of the data. They're different. One of them is wrong
> (yours, as it happens, but how can you tell?).
>
> Not only are you wasting space but you now have wrong data in your database,
> and no way to reliably detect that it is wrong.
>
> The only time I'd use an append is when you intentionally want a point-in-time
> snapshot of the current data in BigJoe, realizing that it may be out of date
> at any later time.
> --
>
> John W. Vinson [MVP]
> .
>
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