A Bitter Inheritance!

[Jacko]

Oh God! Any advice on this one would be appreciated! I have inherited a
database at work, the usual customer details type thing. There are almost
110,000 records and ONE TABLE ! Yes, one! No relationships or nothing! It
gets better: this table has NO PRIMARY KEY ! The same customer can be
duplicated anything up to a dozen times, one record for each claim they have
made! Is there any crafty way I can identify the particular record open in a
form without a primary key? There is NO other unique identifier on the
record. If I query by the National Insurance Number, I get ALL the records
for that customer, not just the one I want! Help me Obi-wan-Kenobe, you're
my only help!

 

[Douglas J. Steele]

Figure out what the database should look like normalized, then write Append
queries to extract the data from the existing table into the various
normalized tables. You'll need to use SELECT DISTINCT on most of the
queries.

 

[Albert D. Kallal]

Why not just add a autonumber field to the database. You will then have a
unique identify for each record.

 

[Doug M]

It sounds like the National Insurance Number is unique for each customer?
That would give you the foundation for the SELECT DISTINCT.