>dangerous habits that people acquire when they rely on autoincrement
>fields and inbuilt functions to patch up a bad data model.

What's wrong with autoincrement fields? I always felt Access/Paradox
built-in autoincrement type is so much easier than IB/Oracle need to
fiddle with generators/sequences. Not that it couldn't be done, but
having to have a generator/sequence AND a before insert trigger
(and also the stored procedure that does the same as the trigger
if you are writing your client app in Delphi and the like) on
each table (I am an autoID freak) increases the complexity of the
database. The
CREATE TABLE Tab(
ID AutoNumber PRIMARYKEY,
...
)
is so much simpler, and, therefore, better.

Now, the Access wizard would be really marvelous. I remember
frustration I experienced when I had to port some databases from
Access to Oracle and Oracle wizard just didn't work (or converted all
Number fields into Varchar2 on those rare occasions when it didn't
crash)... I got much better results by first using Borland datapump
to get the DB from Access to IB and then converting from IB to Oracle
(straightforward). Actually we developed an application in-house that
reads Access database and spits out Oracle db creation code and
optionally INSERT statements... The only trouble is multi-line data
in Text and Memo fields... never could figure out the SQL for that...

Back to lurking mode,

Syarzhuk

Be healthy, stay wealthy...

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