Date format

[James]

Hello

Im trying to create a field that displays date like on a
credit card mm/yy. This is not a problem, but when
entering the date in this format the field thinks you are
entering in dd/mm/yy so for example, I want to enter a
date as October 2005 so I type 08/05 but then the system
changes is to 05/04!! I have tried a custom format under
date/time and have made a input mask but it always does
it.

Please help!

Many thanks James.

 

[Duane Hookom]

A date field can only contain a full date. If you want to store only a month
and year, I would create two numieric fields, one for month and one for
year. You can always display these as mm/yy or any other format.

 

[Guest]

Try This:
Go to Control Panel.
Click on Regional Settings.
Select "Date" Tab (Top Right)
Change the Short Date format to 'MM/yy'
Remember to use capital letters for month, 'mm' refers to minutes

 

[Duane Hookom]

I would never change regional settings for all Windows applications to make
one app "maybe" run properly. A date field must store the day of the month.

 

[James]

many thanks for your reply, I think I will have to stick
to text format.

Few more questions, I'm building a database not my first
but just a couple of questions:

How many fields can a table have before it becomes too
big or slow?

How many tables can a Access database have before it
becomes slow?

How big MB/records can a database be?

Many thanks.

 

[Duane Hookom]

Check Help for the Access specifications for the "official" answers/limits.
The actual sizes and numbers will vary depending on the number of users and
lots of other factors. I know of several apps with millions of records that
run reliably and other apps with hundreds that seem slow.

 

[John Vinson]

many thanks for your reply, I think I will have to stick
to text format.

Few more questions, I'm building a database not my first
but just a couple of questions:

How many fields can a table have before it becomes too
big or slow?

"Too slow" is a rubber ruler. For some users, twenty seconds to get an
answer is cause for delight (compared to the many minutes for some
older systems); for some others, 0.75 seconds is intolerably
lethargic.

Speed is also dependent upon many other factors than database size.
Are your tables properly indexed? Are your queries optimally designed?
How about your network? How much network traffic is going on, due to
Access or due to other applications? How fast is your processor? How
much memory do you have installed on the frontend? on the backend?

There's a hard limit of 255 fields; in practice a 60-field table is
EXTREMELY wide, not so much because of performance as because of
logical structure.

How many tables can a Access database have before it
becomes slow?

Some of my databases have over 200 tables. The proper number of tables
is - enough to represent all the valid entities for the application.

How big MB/records can a database be?

2 GByte (2048 MByte); no explicit limit on the number of records. The
largest production Access database of which I am aware has some
50,000,000 records in the largest table; I'd be inclined to look into
SQL/Server or another client/server design (using Access as a
frontend) considerably before that, but millions of records should be
fine (subject to the caveats above).

 

[Guest]

Many thanks youve been very helpfull!

-----Original Message-----


"Too slow" is a rubber ruler. For some users, twenty seconds to get an
answer is cause for delight (compared to the many minutes for some
older systems); for some others, 0.75 seconds is intolerably
lethargic.

Speed is also dependent upon many other factors than database size.
Are your tables properly indexed? Are your queries optimally designed?
How about your network? How much network traffic is going on, due to
Access or due to other applications? How fast is your processor? How
much memory do you have installed on the frontend? on the backend?

There's a hard limit of 255 fields; in practice a 60- field table is
EXTREMELY wide, not so much because of performance as because of
logical structure.


Some of my databases have over 200 tables. The proper number of tables
is - enough to represent all the valid entities for the application.

2 GByte (2048 MByte); no explicit limit on the number of records. The
largest production Access database of which I am aware has some
50,000,000 records in the largest table; I'd be inclined to look into
SQL/Server or another client/server design (using Access as a
frontend) considerably before that, but millions of records should be
fine (subject to the caveats above).


.