3D Database Concept

[Susan Owen]

Alan is correct about patents, copyrights, and trademarks being different beasts, each with its own proper method of keeping. However, my point was that in all cases, nobody can protect anything that is so basic as to be considered "public domain" for any reason. I was addressing the common parts, namely the inability to make money off of something that everyone already uses widely anyway, or that someone can derive from base methods.

Hi, Alan, and thanks for pointing out that it is a bigger can of worms than I said by way of simplification. Anyone who wants to consider Alan's comments about "costing too much to defend" should look at recent history for the "Blackberry" controversy, in which the result was a one-time payment of $500 million to the patent holder to settle the dispute. Think about how much money must have been involved that the infringer decided to settle out of court rather than challenge the legality of the patent.

That's really incredible! I think people lose these cases 99% of the time. Not only that, but it seems there is some law about commercial inventions that the patents expire after a certain period of time so that they will become generally available.

But just what was this "Blackberry" controversy? What product was the fight all about?

 

[gemma-the-husky]

Hi I'm a new user

Different thought

I think the physical structure of an Access database does not actually consist of individual tables etc, (but is rather a monolithic file structure of some sort - ie a black box that returns the correct results) so presumably the database manager (Jet) then applies appropriate logical structures to structure the data. With this in mind it would be very hard to define a modelled structure that would perform quicker than optimised queries etc.

Am I right?

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Very few databases actually consist of "formal" tables these days. Instead they are all pointer-driven. This is because pointer lists are FAR easier to sort according to whatever key you are using. It also has to do with the terrible but true fact that each table's recordsize is different (in potential) than any other recordsize for any OTHER table. Therefore, you cannot build a one-size-fits-all record without wasting LOTS of space. Therefore, you run into problems rearranging the records. Not to mention that one report will want the recordsets sorted one way, the form does it another way, and the datasheet-view query has it a third way. So pointer manipulation is the far easier way to manage the records.

Imagine if you will a bucket of living worms of different sizes. Watch them move around for a while. Access records are about like a bucket of worms.