Microsoft® Office Access 2003 Inside Out

When to Break the Rules

As a starting point for every application that you build, you should always analyze the tasks you need to perform, decide on the data required to support those tasks, and create a welldesigned (also known as normalized) database table structure. After you have a design that follows all the rules, you might discover changes that you need to make either to follow specific business rules or to make your application more responsive to the needs of your users. In every case for which you decide to "break the rules," you should know the specific reason for doing so, document your actions, and be prepared to add procedures to your application to manage the impact of those changes. The following sections discuss some of the reasons ...