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Originally Posted by
copeg
Which means that perhaps it should be a row, but perhaps not in this particular table
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Database Normalization 101.
Well the database is designed where we have 16 different categories of data for 285 things. Each category of data holds monthly data for each thing, going back to January 2005.
So we have it designed with 16 tables. Each table has columns which represent the date and rows which represent a thing and its data for each time period.
Then the data is put into an Excel sheet (same format as database), average columns are added at the end that average the two most recent years for each month, then relationship average rows are added to the bottom to average each thing based on their relationship for each category in each time period (and those have yearly averages for the most recent months). Then, 2 giant Excel sheets are made: 1) that is a report breakdown for each thing and its statistics for the past 5 years for each month and quarter. 2) that is a report of a different type of breakdown for each thing. When printed, those 2 Excel sheets combined creates over 500 pages. Then another giant Excel sheet is made of a summary of the data. Then a final sheet is added as a comparison of the changes over time for each thing and notes all the significant things about the data. On that sheet is also generated a list of comments to describe certain things with the data.
Before I came along, this report was largely generated with the use of a complex Excel document of Excel formulas. Those Excel documents were about 15mb in size and took like 10 minutes to open b/c of the calculations. With my first attempt of going JAVA all over this report's ass, I narrowed the size down to 8mb by taking almost all of the calculations out of it and having the values calculated in the JAVA code and hardcoded into the Excel document. It is far better now.
See
SQL Data Types, which Number does not seem to be a member of. How you get the actual data type I don't know as I'm not familiar with the Access 2007 syntax to do so.
I am basing the data type from the Access, where if you go to Datasheet and click of cell it has
Data Type: and it says
Number for those values. Under that has
Format: where it says
#.00 as the value there. Still, that is very vague as there are several decimal data types.