> >
> > Professional software developers are supposed to know to normalize data files. This should be a new topic.
> >
> > The sale is one file. The customer is another file. The boat may have been sold with extras. These could be in yet another file. The boat base price plus the sum of the extras is the final sales price on the invoice. Very typical stuff.
> >
> > If you have all data in one record, multiple people cannot work with the record at the same time.
> >
> > Mike Yearwood
> >
> >
> >
>
>
> Mike,
>
> Normalization does not really affect the ability for multiple users to work on a single record. That has to do with your buffering/record locking strategy and how you separate the data entry tasks. With an optimistic record locking strategy, user1 could work with fields 1 - 5, user2 could work on fields 6 - 13, etc. No conflicts would occur.

I think that is rarely the case. If the data is normalized, the relevant columns only exist in the one table. Therefore the chances of conflict are higher.

By denormalizing, what you describe can happen, but requires much more complexity to resolve conflicts, possibly resulting in a deadlock.

Mike Yearwood