Direct Relationships

[RS]

I am building my first Access Data base and it is in 2007. When building
relationships, do I need to connect a table to every table that I want it to
communicate with, or will it be able to communicate with it through a third
table that they are both connected to? So, do all of the relationships have
to be direct, or will indirect relationships work?

 

[Al Campagna]

RS,
That all depends on what your tables are designed to do.
Without examples of your table/s data, and what you are trying
to accomplish, no specific response is possible as to how they
should be related... or not related... to other tables.
--
hth
Al Campagna
Microsoft Access MVP 2006-2009
http://home.comcast.net/~cccsolutions/index.html

"Find a job that you love... and you'll never work a day in your life."

 

[ghetto_banjo]

i dont think you necessarily need to create relationships for
anything. i have created quite a few databases and never messed with
them. in my eyes, it's more of just an organizational tool that might
make it easier for some people to remember how tables are related. it
will allow you to show the "related" records in one table to another
table (i.e. All customer orders for a specific customer, etc).

but in terms of creating queries to link/update/etc, it will not
matter if the tables have a "relationship" defined in access.


please correct me if i am off base on this one....

 

[Douglas J. Steele]

i dont think you necessarily need to create relationships for
anything. i have created quite a few databases and never messed with
them. in my eyes, it's more of just an organizational tool that might
make it easier for some people to remember how tables are related. it
will allow you to show the "related" records in one table to another
table (i.e. All customer orders for a specific customer, etc).

but in terms of creating queries to link/update/etc, it will not
matter if the tables have a "relationship" defined in access.


please correct me if i am off base on this one....

In my opinion, you are off-base on this one.

You're completely missing the whole idea of Relational Integrity, which is
critical for ensuring internal data consistency. Some people would argue
that you haven't got a relational database if you don't have referential
integrity.