...some of the things you awnser are awsome
/me blushes... Thanks for that. Now if I can just show the boss...

Now for the surprising bit... I've never actally used SSADM as a formal methodology - the details of it are lost in my memory banks somewhere. I did study it along with a couple of other formal methodologies when I was with British Gas back in 1988-1993 but I have forgotten most of it now. If I need the details, I just look them up (I do have a fairly extensive library). Often the code I post is straight out of a book or a database that I have done. It's not knowing the code, it's knowing where to look

I have never forgotten the normalisation methods though since I use them day in, day out. One thing you do learn as you gain experience is that sometimes data is better de-normalised - entirely depends on the situation.

Normalisation is a great technique but it can lead to a lot of tables that you then have to stitch back together with Union queries which are not updatable Sometimes I will not fully normalise the data so that I can apply action queries to one table and not ten. That may not be pure but it is pragmatic. Also writing the code to handle the redundancy issues can be quite fun...

When are you in town? tumblingdown, Gaffer and I get together for a snifter now and again.

Cheers,

P.