Recent content by ButtonMoon

Bear in mind that joins and "relationships" are utterly different things. Access's diagram feature muddles up those concepts whereas SQL Server Management Studio does not. It's also the case that both SSMS and Access are not capable of drawing real ER Diagrams. Instead they use a pictorial...

As you suggested, it's a crazy idea to make up something like this, given that third-party services and industry standard software provides these features out of the box. Presumably you are aware that encrypting data using an undisclosed algorithm is what security experts call "snake oil". I...

Access would be a very strange and counter-productive choice for an appointment management application IMO. It has no browser-based, cloud or mobile device based option and there are plenty of free or cheap appointment management alternatives available. Microsoft isn't discontinuing Access AFAIK...

So that would be a SQL Server database, not an Access database. The question here is apparently about Access databases and not about applications developed in Access.

Not my phrase. It was used by Mike Smart at the start of this thread. In fact I try to avoid the term "alternate" and I would usually just say composite key. According to Google Books there are 69 database and data modelling books containing the phrase "composite alternate key" and 8780 books...

isladogs, Thanks for correcting my syntax. You are right. You said you understand the terms alternate and composite. What else would you call a key that is both alternate and composite? Do you believe those two terms are mutually exclusive? Oddly the author of this thread seems to think that...

A composite alternate key is just an alternate key that has more than one attribute (nothing to do with foreign keys). For example, this table has two composite keys: (a,b) and (c,d). CREATE TABLE tbl (a INT NOT NULL, b INT NOT NULL, c INT NOT NULL, d INT NOT NULL UNIQUE (a,b), UNIQUE (c,d));

A composite key is a key consisting of more than one attribute. An alternate key is just a key that isn't the "primary" key (alternate keys are sometimes called secondary keys, candidate keys or just keys). Unfortunately the power of myths often increases with age.

Where did this myth originate from? It is possible to create composite alternate keys and has been since at least 2003 (and probably before) as far as I know. There are multiple other misconceptions mentioned here but that is possibly the worst.

Umm, perhaps the fact that it is a niche product which Microsoft has left in suspended animation for over a decade. In the same period the market-leading products covering some of the same core capabilities (rapid application development, data management, data analytics, reporting) have seen an...

It's worth clarifying the difference between selling an application and selling a database. Despite the question that started this thread, I believe this thread has so far only talked about selling applications, not databases. Legally and practically they are very different things. Generally...

A common back end in Jet is not a client-server database. My recommendation is that you use SQL Server, Oracle or PostgreSQL.

Every database ought to be implemented on a client-server architecture. The technology is ubiquitous, cheap and simple so there isn't much reason to do anything else these days. What is your objection to a server-based DBMS?

Re: lower/upper case in password Here's a slightly more compact way of doing these comparisons: If Not password Like "*[0-9]*" Then err = err + "Password must contain at least one numeric character" + Chr(13) End If If StrComp(password, LCase(password), vbBinaryCompare) = 0 Then err =...

When using SQL Server best practice is to use Windows integrated security. Don't use SQL logins or passwords. You can grant only the permissions needed for each user. They don't need to have the ability to delete or update data unless you want them to. No need to save passwords for linked tables.