This database is linked to SQL tables. I used multiple queries to open duplicate forms because the different criteria. Then I tried creating the search criteria with macros in the where condition. Both ways are extremely slow.
Should this be handled through the "on Load" Even Procedure? With an If statement? to get the results of each query currently used.
From your question the key part that stood out as a potential problem area was the part about using macros in the WHERE clause. The problem with that is you will have to bring lots of records down the wire to your local computer to do the processing.
Its like ringing a car dealer and saying “I would like to by a red car and it has to fit in my garage” The dealer knows what red cars he has (index) but does not know anything about your garage so has to drive each car (record) to your house (computer) and try to fit it in your garage!
If you can move all the processing to the server it would help , so expanding on the car example you ring up and say “I want a red car that is no wider than 4’” The dealer can now just send the cars (records) that match that criteria to your house (computer).
That’s all the help I can be for now until more information is provided
Related
First time posting. Long time reader!
I've recently started delving into Access. I have some background/slash knowledge with databasing and I've made good progress on my little project - however, I am stumped when it comes to nesting/many one-to-many's. I'm trying to work it all out as an algorithm first, instead of continuing on in frustration. I vaguely remember that in SQL you can have parent and child forms, where the child form each parent is persistent. Is that the same with MS Access Subforms?
Maybe its a limitation of Access, or maybe I'm just a muppet noob - so I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction!
Scenario:
Let's consider a building/office: This building has Doors and Rooms. For the sake of the question, let's only consider the Doors and Rooms.
In my scenario, a Room can have multiple doors, whereas a Door can only have a maximum of two Rooms (the two rooms that it joins).
I have a table of Doors and a table of Rooms, each with a PK.
I want to have a list of Doors, that demonstrates what Rooms they are associated with (should only ever be two) and I also want a register of Rooms, that lists all Doors associated with the Room.
Problem 1: So considering the Rooms scenario, how would I associate it with the Doors Table, in such a way that I can have multiple entries linked to the Room Table. I'm assuming a join them through a third table that links Rooms and Doors.
Problem 2: In relation to the Doors scenario, what would be the best way? Would I make two columns/fields in the Door Table, like Room_A and Room_B, or would I somehow join them through a third table?
Problem 3: Further to this, I will need to make a list of all Doors that are accessible in both Room_A and Room_B. I think this part won't be so hard once the two other problems are dealt with.
Before anyone jumps in and says "upload a screenshot you douchebag" - I can't upload anything at the moment. I'll try and upload something later today.
Thanks in advance for any info!
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About the Program
Excuse the vague title, but I'm rather new to mySQL and databases. I'm a developer in VB.NET and need to create a program that connects to a database. The program is a guide for a game, and part of the program gives you directions to your next objective when you select a mission. For example, from the application (made in WinForms), you select a "mission" from a combo-box control, and a Textbox will populate according to the objectives in the database. A further example could be displayed as this:
You Select "The First Misson" from the Combo-Box control.
The Textbox Control now contains a numerical list of objectives in order, like so:
Locate John.
John asks you to find a weapon
Give the weapon to John
Help John fight off the monster
John asks you to heal him with a potion
Help John reach the portal at the end of the tunnel
Speak to John about your rewards
Now, the question is how may I display a list like the one above using a database? I was reading up on normalization; however, I still do not see how this may be done.
This is an example of the application (just a mock up, but very similar):
Now say the user selected a misson from the Combo-box located at the top of the application. The application would populate like so:
Ideas via Normalization
I understand I could create two seperate tables containing data relating to the misson. For example, I might be able to create a table called "Stages", and a table called "Missons", but I see this as inefficient, not to mention populating the database itself would take ages. I quickly found that you could not (obviously) store a list in a single cell. So being just a programmer, and not someone who works with databases, I this is very frustrating.
(If it may help, I can also alter the application in which is retrieving data from the database to allow a list to be displayed a different way.)
The Overall Issue
There may be "work-arounds" to address this problem, but I don't know what to do. I do not understand how you could display such data using a database. I understand how you connect to the database and retrieve data using queries, just not with a list. Also, an elaborate answer would be much appreciated for a newbie at this like me.
From what I read, you seem to be primarily stuck up on database relationships. No worries! When you want a "list" in a database, this means you are looking for a one-to-many relationship, or a many-to-many relationship. Here is a brief tutorial that explains the differences between these types of relationships.
One of the first steps in database design is to define your entities (i.e. your tables.) In general, your entities will typically be major nouns from your business problem. In this case, you clearly have the following entities (tables): Mission and Objective. The only other data present on your form is a textbox for mission location and a textbox for mission requirements. Both of these fields can be single properties of the Mission table.
The next step is to define your entity relationships. You might define your relationships as follows:
A Mission has one-to-many Objectives
An Objective belongs to one Mission
Finally, lets list out our known properties:
A Mission has a name (text)
A Mission has one location (text)
A Mission has one requirement (text)
Now we can create a basic database schema. So. What would this look like?
Each table has it's own primary key, denoted by the key image in the picture above. The primary key is a unique identifier for a row of data and is usually represented by an integer. The Objective table also has a foreign key, the missionID field. This is how the one-to-many relationship is defined between these tables.
This way, if we create a Mission with missionID 1, we can assign this missionID to many Objectives. Just like a list, but in the syntax of a relational database. See the images below:
In order to retrieve information about both entities at once, you might use a JOIN query. Hope this helps!
You probably should read up on entities and relationships.
Entities are database parlance for things like a game, a mission, a requirement, and a player (a person).
Relationships are database parlance for statements like
each game has one or more missions in it
each mission has one or more requirements in it, displayed in order
zero or more players can be playing each game.
Each table in your rdms is a collection of instances of a particular entity. So, you'll have a requirement table, for example, that will record the following information for each requirement, each in its own row of the table, for example
game_id the game for which this is a requirement
mission_id the mission for which this is a requirement
requirement_ordinal 1,2,3,4 etc for which requirement in sequence this one is.
description the text describing the requirement: "Speak to John about normalizing your rewards."
You may declare that a particular combination of the first three items uniquely identifies each requirement, which is to say that (game_id,mission_id,requirement_ordinal) is the primary key for the requirement table.
Desktop apps like MySQL Developer and MS Access have graphic design tools that let you draw this stuff in a charts. Here's a writeup. http://docs.oracle.com/cd/A87860_01/doc/java.817/a81358/05_dev1.htm This business of entity-relationship modeling can get very elaborate and abstruse, so be careful not to dive in too deep.
Working this all out is what database design is about. I can't design this whole thing for you, but I can offer you some jargon and a conceptual framework to help you figure out how to search for it.
What are the options for making a data cleansing process (deduplication/matching)
when dealing with MS SQL Server 2008 R2?
Or better yet how can I weight scores on a matching process on columns of a row?
The situation is the following: I have a persons table on my database and their associated addresses and documents in other database tables?
How can I make the best decision of match based on Name, Serial no of the document and address? As I understood SSIS fuzzy groping won't support this feature: weighted scoring.
I do not have much experience with SSIS at the moment - so this answer is focused on the de-duping/matching/scoring aspect of your question.
There are many ways to approach a Data Quality strategy such as this, all of which have Pro's and Cons and I think a lot of it comes down to your existing data management strategies - how clean and standardised is the data you are trying to dedupe?
Even 'simple' items like telephone numbers can be difficult to dedupe if you have not got this correct - for example all of these are different representations of the same number:
+1 (888) 707-8822
1-888-707-8822
18887078822
001 888 7078822
888-7078822
The more complex structures such as addresses get even more interesting: are 'flat 2' and 'apartment 2' the same thing or different?
You have two choices - make it your self or trust a third party
Make it yourself
Advantages
Lots of fun logical problems to work through
Will be able to tweak and improve at will 'forever' as your solution grows
Disadvantages
It will take a lot of time.
Each country you use will need looking at separately - there are no high quality 'global' rules that you can apply (but there of of course snippets that can be reused)
Third Party
Advantages
If de-duplication is not your specialty - let the experts do it
Ready to go and deliver value immediately
Disadvantages
Cost
Whether you go your own route or third party I suggest you start by creating a clear goal.
What are your inputs:
How 'clean' is your data?
How standardised is your data?
How do the records link together.
Are the address records just from one country or are they from several.
What are your workflows:
How often do you need to run this process?
Do you want to stop duplicates entering your system in the first place or just run periodic bulk runs?
What do you want from the project?
To what level (document, person, household, organisation - see below) do you want to identify duplicates
What do you want to do with those duplicates
Delete duplicates and keep one record
Merge duplicates to create one master record
This stage is sometimes refereed to as creating the 'Golden' record. Deciding which information to keep, and which information to disregard.
To go into a bit more detail about some of those choices, consider the following dummy addresses:
Are you trying to dedupe to household level:
Ann Smith, 1 main st, DupeVille, MA, 12345
Bob Smith, 1 main street, DupeVille, MA, 12345
become
Ann and Bob Smith, 1 Main St, DupeVille, MA, 12345-6789
Person Level
Robert Smith, 1 main st, DupeVille, MA, 12345
Bob Smith, 1 main street, DupeVille, MA, 12345
become
Robert Smith, 1 Main St, DupeVille, MA, 12345-6789
or even by the ID's in your document database.
Once you have that plan, it may help you make up your mind about the best route to take. If you want to create it yourself, the links you have found certainly put you in the right mindset. If you want to go third party - there are a good range of suppliers out there. Just make sure you choose someone you can trust - they're going to be changing your data!
Google around for the various suppliers - Experian Data Quality are one of them (my company!) and depending upon where in the world you are, you can find your best contact details and more info here: http://www.qas.com/contact/office-locations.htm . We have tools that can integrate with SQL Server 2008 R2 which can score differing input types and then automatically dedupe these for you or return the clusters of potentially groups for your to look after yourself.
Take your plan, and clear idea of what you need from them and discuss it with them. Whoever you choose will be able to talk you through your plan, discuss your goals and tell you if they are the right people for the job.
Think I went on a bit there :-) but hopefully that points you in the right direction - Good luck!
If you do fuzzy grouping with multiple columns you will get _similarity information for every column you choose as input. With this similarity information you can calculate your own tresholds etc.
We presently use a pen/paper based roster to manage table games staff at the casino. Each row is an employee, each column is a 20 minute block of time and each cell represents what table the employee is assigned to, or alternatively they've been assigned to a break. The start and end time of shifts for employees vary as do the games/skills they can deal. We need to keep a copy of the rosters for 7 years, with paper this is fairly easy, I'm wanting to develop a digital application and am having difficulty how to store the data in a database for archiving.
I'm fairly new to working with databases, I think I understand how to model the data for a graph database like neo4j, but I had difficulty when it came to working with time. I've tried to learn about RDBMS databases like MySQL, below is how I think the data should be modelled. Please point out if I'm going in the wrong direction or if a different database type would be more appropriate, it would be greatly appreciated!
Basic Data
Here is some basic data to work with before we factor in scheduling/time.
Employee
- ID Number
- Name
- Skills (Blackjack, Baccarat, Roulette, etc)
Table
- ID Number
- Skill/Type (Can only be one skill)
It may be better to store the roster data as a file like JSON instead? Time sensitive data wouldn't be so much of a problem then. The benefit of going digital with a database would be queries, these could help assist time consuming tasks where human error is common.
Possible Queries
Note: Staff that are on shift are either on a break or on the floor (assigned to a table), Skills have a major or minor type based on difficulty to learn.
What staff have been on the floor for 80 minutes or more? (They are due for a break)
What open tables can I assign this employee to based on their skillset?
I need an employee that has Baccarat skill but is not already been assigned to a Baccarat table.
What employee(s) was on this table during this period of time?
Where was this employee at this point in time?
Who is on shift right now?
How many staff on shift can deal Blackjack?
How many staff have 3 major skills?
What staff have had the Baccarat skill for at least 3 months?
These queries could also be sorted by alphabetical order or time, skill etc.
I'm pretty sure I know how to perform these queries with cypher for neo4j provided I model the data right. I'm not as knowledgeable with SQL queries, I've read it can get a bit complicated depending on the query and structure.
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MYSQL Specific
An employee table could contain properties such as their ID number and Name, but am I right that for their skills and shifts these would be separate tables that reference the employee by a unique integer(I think this is called a foreign key?).
Another table could store the gaming Tables, these would have their own ID and reference a skill/gametype with a foreign key.
To record data like the pen/paper roster, each day could have a table with columns starting from 0000 increasing by 20 in value going all the way to 2340? Prior to the time columns I could have one for staff where each employee is represented with their foreign key, the time columns would then have foreign keys to the assigned gaming Tables, the row data is bound to have many cells that aren't populated since the employee shift won't be 24/7. If I'm using foreign keys to reference gaming Tables I now have a problem when the employee is on break? Unless I treat say the first gaming Table entry as a break?
I may need to further complicate things though, management will over time try different gaming Table layouts, some of the gaming Tables can be converted from say Blackjack to Baccarat. this is bound to happen quite a bit over 7 years, would I want to be creating new gaming Table entries or add a column to use a foreign key and refer to a new table that stores the history of game types during periods of time? Employees will also learn to deal new games during their career, very rarely they may also have the skill removed.
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Neo4j Specific
With this data would I have an Employee and a Table node that have "isA" relationship edges mapping to actual employees or tables?
I imagine with the skills for the two types I would be best with a Skill node and establish relationships like so?: Blackjack->isA->Skill, Employee->hasSkill->Blackjack, Table->typeIs->Blackjack?
TIME
I find difficulty when I want this database to now work with a timeline. I've come across the following suggestions for connecting nodes with time:
Unix Epoch seems to be a common recommendation?
Connecting nodes to a year/month/day graph?
Lucene timeline? (I don't know much about this or how to work with it, have seen some mention it)
And some cases with how time and data relate:
Staff have varied days and start/end times from week to week, this could be shift node with properties {shiftStart,shiftEnd,actualStart,actualEnd}, staff may arrive late or get sick during shift. Would this be the right way to link each shift to an employee? Employee(node)->Shifts(groupNode)->Shift(node)
Tables and Staff may have skill data modified, with archived data this could be an issue, I think the solution is to have time property on the relationship to the skill?
We open and close tables throughout the day, each table has open/close times for each day, this could change in a month depending on what management wants, in addition the times are not strict, for various reasons a manager may open or close tables during the shift. The open/closed status of a table node may only be relevant for queries during the shift, which confuses me as I'd want this for queries but for archiving with time it might not make sense?
It's with queries that I have trouble deciding when to use a node or add a property to a node. For an Employee they have a name and ID number, if I wanted to find an employee by their ID number would it be better to have that as a node of it's own? It would be more direct right, instead of going through all employees for that unique ID number.
I've also come across labels just recently, I can understand that those would be useful for typing employee and table nodes rather than grouping them under a node. With the shifts for an employee I think should continue to be grouped with a shifts node, If I were to do cypher queries for employees working shifts through a time period a label might be appropriate, however should it be applied to individual shift nodes or the shifts group node that links back to the employee? I might need to add a property to individual shift nodes or the relationship to the shifts group node? I'm not sure if there should be a shifts group node, I'm assuming that reducing the edges connecting to the employee node would be optimal for queries.
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If there are any great resources I can learn about database development that'd be great, there is so much information and options out there it's difficult to know what to begin with. Thanks for your time :)
Thanks for spending the time to put a quality question together. Your requirements are great and your specifications of your system are very detailed. I was able to translate your specs into a graph data model for Neo4j. See below.
Above you'll see a fairly explanatory graph data model. In case you are unfamiliar with this, I suggest reading Graph Databases: http://graphdatabases.com/ -- This website you can get a free digital PDF copy of the book but in case you want to buy a hard copy you can find it on Amazon.
Let's break down the graph model in the image. At the top you'll see a time indexing structure that is (Year)->(Month)->(Day)->(Hour), which I have abbreviated as Y M D H. The ellipses indicate that the graph is continuing, but for the sake of space on the screen I've only showed a sub-graph.
This time index gives you a way to generate time series or ask certain questions on your data model that are time specific. Very useful.
The bottom portion of the image contains your enterprise data model for your casino. The nodes represent your business objects:
Game
Table
Employee
Skill
What's great about graph databases is that you can look at this image and semantically understand the language of your question by jumping from one node to another by their relationships.
Here is a Cypher query you can use to ask your questions about the data model. You can just tweak it slightly to match your questions.
MATCH (employee:Employee)-[:HAS_SKILL]->(skill:Skill),
(employee)<-[:DEALS]-(game:Game)-[:LOCATION]->(table:Table),
(game)-[:BEGINS]->(hour:H)<-[*]-(day:D)<-[*]-(month:M)<-[*]-(year:Y)
WHERE skill.type = "Blackjack" AND
day.day = 17 AND
month.month = 1 AND
year.year = 2014
RETURN employee, skill, game, table
The above query finds the sub-graph for all employees who have the skill Blackjack and their table and location on a specific date (1/17/14).
To do this in SQL would be very difficult. The next thing you need to think about is importing your data into a Neo4j database. If you're curious on how to do that please look at other questions here on SO and if you need more help, feel free to post another question or reach out to me on Twitter #kennybastani.
Cheers,
Kenny
I have an Access database. Let's pretend it's for a pet store.
There's a table for animals.
Animals (animal_id, birth_date, price)
And then specific tables for the different types of animals we sell.
Dogs (animal_id, bark_volume)
Cats (animal_id, collar_size, shedding_rate)
Fish (animal_id)
Fish aren't interesting so they don't have any special fields. The Fish table just exists so you know which records in the Animals table are fish.
Now, I have a general purpose form for adding animals to the pet store. Before you get the form, you first have to say what kind of animal you're adding. Based on that, the form shows/hides fields, changes its recordsource, and binds the fields to the appropriate data columns. The form pulls its data from the queries DogInfo, CatInfo, and FishInfo.
Now, when you enter a dog or a cat, everything is fine. A record is added to both Animals and either Dogs or Cats.
However, when you enter a Fish, all you get is an Animal, no Fish.
What could be causing this? Is it somehow caused by the lack of other columns on the Fish table?
(Let's leave aside the fact that updating tables with a select query makes no sense at all. I didn't expect Access to let me do it at all in the first place, but Access's motto seems to be "Make the wrong thing easy to do and the right thing awkward to do." The database is relatively simple and infrequently used, though, and it's at least 100 times better than it was before I started working on it, so I'm not really too worried about this issue as long as I can make it work.)
"Is it somehow caused by the lack of other columns on the Fish table?"
Yes - when you enter data on child records (Dogs and Cats) Access will automatically fill in the parent ID (animal_id)
Since there is no data entry for the fish record it does not get created. You have to do that in code. Not sure how your form and data source is setup but you would do something like this on one of the form events:
Fish![animal_id] = Animal![animal_id]
Edit
In your FishInfo query you must give the Fish.[animal_id] an alias - you can't have two fields with the same name - call it Fish_animal_id
Then in the Form_BeforeUpdate event put this:
Me.Fish_animal_id = Me.animal_id
Have you thought about configuring relationships on the different tables? Given the design above, I would start by adding an identifying column to the specific-animal tables, and setting it as the primary key. E.g.:
Dogs(DOG_ID, animal_id, bark_volume)
Cats(CAT_ID, animal_id, collar_size, shedding_rate)
etc. In the relationships view, you'd then define a one-to-many (one-to-one?) relationship from Animals.ANIMAL_ID to Dogs.animal_id. You could then hook up the Animals table to a combo/listbox control on your form to select a record from that table. I think if you configure the control correctly, you can even create new records from that control (or you could use a subform).
Do you not have an separate IDs for the Dogs/Cats/Fish tables? Assuming the only difference is the number of columns, I'd be curious if that suddenly fixed it.
Bad design aside, did you set up a relationship between the various tables? And did you set the tables to enforce referential integrity?