Linking on text

[Kurt Knippel]

quote:

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Originally posted by Donna:

I know that I am not supposed to use a text field to relate tables.

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Why not?

Filemaker indexes the first 20 characters of all fields (well indexable fields anyway). This make no different to anything if the first record in the index is "001" or "ABC". That is the beauty of indexing.

Now this is not true of all RDBMSs, as many do NOT index string/char fields at all, and thus you cannot use them as indexes.

However in Filemaker this is perfectly acceptable. In fact I strongly recommend that you use Text fields as keys and NOT number fields.

Every day I run into a case where being able to add a non-number to a key field is needed.

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Kurt Knippel

Senior Filemaker Developer

http://www.database-resources.com

mailto:[email protected]

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[Donna]

I know that I am not supposed to use a text field to relate tables. But if I am using a unique, single term, is it possible or will I still run into problems?