Tue, 18 Jul 2006

Mutivalued datatypes considered harmful

Un-freaking believable! What was M$ thinking on this? "Multi-valued", indeed! I wrestle with Access tables almost daily, and I already hate every minute of it, mostly because of the arcane data types defined by Access, that don't map to types defined by other database systems or even programming languages. Mercifully the base system in use by my client is Access 98, which has fewer of these than Access 2000. But instead of solving this issue (and I know they're received complaints on it), M$ is seemingly making it worse!

Which is just exactly what their customers needed.

Increasingly developers are required to write applications that interact with database engines, typically Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, MySQL or Access. In many ways the database engine is pretty much immaterial; no matter what the flavour it's still simply a matter of tables, columns, rows and a variety of data types; text, memo, BLOB, numeric, whatever. However if you work with Access, a completely new data type is on the horizon for 2007: multi-valued. Unfortunately, this isn't just-another-data-type, this is a whole different ball game and a dangerous one: more like rollerball than baseball.

(link) [The Register]

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