Property value to large

[hugh0177]

Hi

I have been working on a pretty large database for a while now, and it has been worked over many times.

Just recently, I went into a table, and was trying to modify the properties of a field when I got the error message

"Property value to large"
and then it will not save.

So I can not make any more changes to the database.

I was actually trying to make the field simplier than it was before. I check the other fields and I can't change ANY of them.

I go the imppression that this warning was supposed to mean that one had exceeded the memory limit alocated to any one field, but I don't see how I have done that.
Is it because I have changed things so many times?

What should I do?

Thanks you so ver much!
~desperate

 

[Jack Cowley]

Have you been compacting and repairing on a regular basis (every few hours during construction)? If not, compact and repair. If that does not fix the problem then import everything into a new, blank db and see if that helps.

hth,
Jack

 

[hugh0177]

thank you

I have compacted and repaired occasionally, but not as often as every few hours.
I tried that. nothing happened.
I imported everything else into a new database, nothing happened.

Any other suggestions?

I really don't want to have to erase that table and start all over

thank you either way
K

 

[Jack Cowley]

It looks to me like creating a new Table is the only way you are going to find out if that is the problem. You can try copying the table, but it should not take long to rebuild it from scratch. Once you have it working you should be able to copy any data over from the old table to the new one....

hth,
Jack

 

[hugh0177]

Hi

I fixed it!
I don't know WHY this worked, but I just went through and changed every text field I had to the maximum number of characters (255) a field can have, and magically it worked.
Maybe this will help someone else some day,
although I have NO idea why it helped.

Cheers, Kelly

 

[Jack Cowley]

I am glad you got it working!

 

[tom_cosmic]

Many thanks to user 'hugh0177' for your 2003-09-29, 12:35 PM 'solved it' post.

You fixed my problem.

It's bizzare. It's non-sequitur. I was sure it would not work. But I held my nose and tried it, and it did work. That's twice now that this has worked, in two different databases; one more instance and I'd call it a trend.

And yes, the answer to normalizing is sometimes 'no'.

My big fat 146 column table is an export table, that documents and carries a complete set of data out of Access 2010 and into SPSS 17 for statistical analysis. The table needs to be kept for backup and debug, but mostly just to load the data into SPSS (which keeps its data for any one step of analysis in only one, flat, non-relational table, as far as I know). When this same problem happened last month, I reluctantly cut some data out of the table. When it happened this time, there was no data left to cut.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

 

[gemma-the-husky]

two things.

if you try to reduce the size of a field, you may have problems with data that is larger than the new size, but I don't think it is that.

the other thing is that an access record can only be 4000 bytes long, so a number of vary long text fields may cause it to exceed that. maybe that was the issue

 

[tom_cosmic]

Yep, you're right that it's bad to make fields too small -- but notice that the fix is to make all of the 'text' columns 255 (maximum size). So the fact that it accomplishes a fix is contrary to common sense. But it did work. And your remark about going over the 4K row-size limit is well taken. After the fix was in, I tried to also paste back in the columns that I had cut out a month ago. That resulted in the same "Property size is too large" error, even with all of the text fields hiked up to 255 chars. I didn't count up the bytes, but it's possible that I ran into the 4K limit you predicted. In either case, the 'fix' works, but isn't perfect.