Relational Database Theory

Back in the Stone Age when I built databases in the 1980s, different clients had different standards by which they wanted their programs/databases documented. I'm talking about System documentation, not User documentation. The standards were often part of the overall development methodology adopted by the team. I am currently freelancing rather than working for consulting companies and need to know what you young chickens are using for doc standards, if anything? I must have lost all my references back in the flood. Am I talking Ancient Arabic? Anyone follow any standards these days? Thanks ever so much, Kay.

Here is a design question for you all: how far do you go with separate, related files vs. larger files to simplify relationships? for instance, I'm working on a design helper suite for radiant floor heating systems. This has a ton of parts in it, such as heat loss calculations, pump head calculations, customer information, building information, etc etc etc. Many times I need information specific to the components of the system. Various components that carry their own information are things like Heat sources, tubing types, pump sizes, electronic controller types, heat exchangers, manifolds, fitting types, etc etc etc. Needless to say, this is a big project. Now I co…

I hope that I'm in the right forum. Is there a limit on the physical size or the number of entries in a "user dictionary" in filemaker 5? I have an extensive database that includes numerous text fields and fields that contain terms such as "ENG07 GH01". There are about 2000 such codes and about 13000 records. I am trying to spell check the document and reach a point where it will not learn new spellings. The user dictionary is about 40k in size and seems to hold about 1000 terms. Is this an inbuilt limit?

Earlier, someone was asking about Filemaker terms versus other databases. I recently started researching this and have gleaned that there are actually 3 sets of terms: the FMP terms, other Relational Database Management System terms (Oracle, Access, SQL, etc) and then the general terms used in relational data modeling theory. I hope the info below holds it's format well enough so you can see it. If anyone has any corrections, please post. In FMP----------Other RDBMS----------Relational Theory File---------------Table----------------------Entity Field-------------Column-------------------Attribute Records---------Rows---------------------Tuples Relationships--Join…

Have you tried dumping the data into Excel first. I haven't done any quite like this data, but it is usually better to dump it in Excel and massage it there first before importing into FMP. Maybe someone else has more experience with this technique than I do... Cael.

I'm one of the many who think Filemaker is great precisely because you don't need to be a techie to create a dbase. But there comes a time when you know what the task is, but you can't work out the best approach....I have a dbase with around 800-1000 records, representing people. There are 100 subsets of up to 10 records which are not constant, i.e. a person can be moved from one subset to another. From time to time, I want to view a specific subset (in form, not list, format) and to see at the same time on the layout 3 fields of information specific to each person. All this is easy to do either with 10 relationships and 30 related fields on the layout, or with a script…

There are a few terms that you might want to remember when coming into the world of FileMaker. So you understand the correlation between FileMaker and enterprise level databases. FileMaker = Translation File = Table Search = Query Find = Query Anyone else want to add to the list?

I'm posting here because I didn't know where else to go. "The Left Brain" seemed the most appropriate of the general forums. FMPro seems to attract a lot of people without huge experience of database design theory. IMO this is a great strength of the product: you can make a working database without reading huge amounts of literature first (unlike, say, FoxPro or 4D). However, the time comes when a little knowledge of theory is useful. The other day, someone asked me about "third normal form" and I looked like an idiot when I said I had no idea. I checked out the term later and it is fairly intuitive, it's just I'd never heard of it. This is the kind of thing I'm talkin…

is there a way to print an ERD from a *.USR files? thanks.