Mysterious fields

[richard bro-42]

Mysterious fields showing uo in some of my tabled that I imported from another access DB as follows;
• What are they?
• How did they get there?
• What do they mean?

Field: Type:
S_ColLineage OLE Object
S_Generation Number
S_GUILD AutoNumber
S_Lineage OLE Object

 

[The_Doc_Man]

OLE objects are "Object Linking or Embedding" fields that can contain info on non-Access documents. Images, text and mixed-format documents (PDF, Word .DOC, Excel .XLS) etc.

An OLE object takes up a lot of space in an Access database (relatively speaking) because of the size limits on .MDB/.ACCDB files - 2 GB per file. Usually, you want to hyperlink to the external file, because Access can open it based solely on the file type.

The "Number" field is hard to say because it is usually qualified as LONG, WORD, DOUBLE, SINGLE, or some other numeric type.

The "Autonumber" (in Access) is a LONG integer for which the value is determined by Access itself when you create a new record.

As to what the names mean? If you don't know what was in the DB, why did you import it?

 

[CJ_London]

It may be the file you are importing from is a .mdb that had been set up for replication, either as a master or as replica

the S_GUID AutoNumber used to be used in .mdbs which had been set up for replication. The replication capability was removed from 2007 (although you can write your own version if required as you can still set an autonumber field as a replication ID number

Guid values are supposed to be totally unique on a global scale - i.e. it will never be repeated anywhere in any other (at least access) application - but comes at a price of being large (I think 16 or 32 bytes v 4 bytes for a long.

They do not look like numbers - more like this

{039ECF83-E09B-4E34-9263-93D1B7F3BE46}

but they are not text (just as dates are not text) and have limitations in use (can't remember what now, been long time)

 

[richard bro-42]

Thank you CJ, Your analysis is most likely correct. I did import from an old database I built with Access 2003. Those fields aren't depicted in the old DB just the new one after I import. Have a nice day.