Hi there,

Are there any general guidelines as to how many relationships one file or table should have with another? One of our DBs has developed quite a few relationships due to the creation of various specialised reports and I'm concerned that there may be a limit. Does it depend on the server processing power only? We have the latest Macs so our hardware is good.

Cheers,

Steven

I'm not aware of any limit to the number of relationships allowed between any two tables. I'd say anywhere between 1 and 5 is typical. In a complex solution, there could be more. Some calendar solutions use 42 relationships for the possible dates in a month-view, plus a few for other things.

In general, if you're finding yourself creating lots of relationships, you should re-examine the structure to see if there's a better way. I make a lot of reports, but I rarely have to add relationships to make them work.

Regarding performance: the number of relationships doesn't matter unless you're talking about the number of relationships involved in a user layout, calc, or script process.