Allocation of storage 1

[spruceni]

Hi

I want to add a customer history facility to an existing database. All the customer details are already held but I want to add a contact date, service used, staff member involved and comments.

The comments field causes me the most difficulty as it could contain no text or lots of text. If I use a memo field will this reserve a large number of bytes which could be empty there by wasteing space on the database. Perhaps a memo field allocates space dynamically and reserves only what is needed.

Also will a memo field facilate searching the text for words or phrases.

Regards

 

[Remou]

Access does not reserve space for fields, but there are other problems with memo fields, such as indexing. It is possible to search memo fields for words and phrases.

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http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/access/HA102319531033.aspx

 

[fneily]

The article doesn't stated it explicitly, but the memo field is variable depending on length of inputted text. So a memo field having 100 words has storage space greater then the next record with memo field having 10 words. But, you may ask, according to the theory of normalization, tables cannot have variable length records (first normal form)? So, memo data is not stored "within" the table itself. The table keeps a pointer to the data which resides outside of the table. But, then again, everything in a computer's memory is a pointer. Because memory is cheap and computers are fast, the point is rather moot nowadays.

 

[spruceni]

Thankyou for this information. The fact that Access uses a pointer to the memo data clarifies the dataspace query.