Deleting old records from a table

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I am building a database for a credit union. They want to track vehicle
loans to ensure the collateral is insured. The records are updated weekly,
but I am having to compare the new information with the old. Since I'm not a
programmer, I have used the unmatched query option to compare the two data
files. My problem is that once the comparison has been made, I'm not sure
how to delete old members and collateral, determined by the unmatech query,
from the member and collateral tables. Any suggestions on how to do this
without programming?
 
lizasue said:
I am building a database for a credit union. They want to track vehicle
loans to ensure the collateral is insured. The records are updated
weekly,
but I am having to compare the new information with the old. Since I'm
not a
programmer, I have used the unmatched query option to compare the two data
files. My problem is that once the comparison has been made, I'm not sure
how to delete old members and collateral, determined by the unmatech
query,
from the member and collateral tables. Any suggestions on how to do this
without programming?
Click to expand...

Without some clarification of the details of what you have, and how it is
stored, we can't give you good specific help. Generally, you will need to
be able to do some "programming" to create a useful business application,
but there are exceptions -- one colleague prepared a database to track food
orders for the food service department of a School District for which he
worked, said the only code in it was that which was generated by the form
and control wizards, and it served their needs for around ten years.

Deleting old information may not be a good idea. It may be a much better
idea to keep that information as archive / history, in case analyzing it
might turn out to be useful in the future. If you save a date with it, you
can almost certainly use that date to select just the current information in
a query instead of opening the table.

Larry Linson
Microsoft Access MVP
 
The two main tables are a members table and a collateral table. The
relationship between these tables is based on a member number (primary key in
the members table and foreign key in the collateral table). The collateral
tables uses the vin of each vehicle as the primary key for that table. All
of the data, both that already in the database and the new uploaded
information is, for the most part, identical except that each week new
vehicle loans are established and other vehicle loans are paid off. The
unmatched queries determine the new loans, which I append to the existing
data, and the loan information from the exisiting data where a loan is
terminated due to payoff. The credit union tracks insurance information by
adding expiration dates as the data comes in. At first we thought we could
just delete old records when the new came in, but that would eliminate all
the insurance expiration information that is input. So when I run the
unmatched query with old data against new, I get a list of vehicle loans that
have been paid off. I use that query to make a table of these individuals,
and in the past the CU just went in manually to delete these records.
However, they have decided that it is very time consuming and would like that
part automated. I can go ahead and delete the table with the information,
but that doesn't eliminate the information from the main tables. It is not
necessary to keep the old information since the only thing going on with this
database is the tracking of insurance. I'm also not certain including a date
with the data would help me. I will see if I can find someone who knows
about programming and see if they can help a non-programmer. Thanks for your
reply. I appreciate your ideas.
 
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