Making All Tables Accessible

[NC]

Hi there,
This might be a stupid question, but is it ok to make all tables in an MDB
database accessible through RecordSet, or should I only make accessible the
one I will be using at a specific moment in the program?

In other words,

I open the database, at program start, then make all tables accessible
through RecordSet, after opening the database.

Or should

Open the database, and at the moment I will be using a specific table, make
it accessible through RecordSet?

Any Clues?

Yours Sincere,
N.C

Please Post Reply here.

Thanks

[ralph]

You didn't mention the size of your database, how important it is to
have all the data at one time in the application, if this is primarily
just for "reading" or will you also be "massaging" the data, nor if
any other processes/applications will be chewing on the database at
the same time, but consider the following ...

An ADO Recordset is structure made up of a Variant collection of
Variant collections holding Variants. Any Recordset is going to take
more 'space' that the equivalent 'data' has in the database. For a
moderate sized database and with memory available now today's this
might not be that big a deal, but needs to be considered.

Large Recordsets also take time to construct.

Also you have effectively locked the entire database, this will have
consequences for other queries against it. Do you really need all that
information available at one time?

Assuming for a moment that your application is some kind of general
business application where you are actually only interested in some
portion of the data you will have returned. What you have done is
effectively removed any logical relationships (the whole point of
storing data in a Relational database in the first place), and moved
it to the business logic of your program.

Is that wise? That tightly couples the application to the structure of
the database - any changes to the database may or may not cause you to
revisit the application.

Again, really don't know what you are doing and that of course that
knowledge could make a huge difference in how appropriate it might be
to load an entire database at one time.

-ralph