Microsoft Access 2A: Navigating Tables: Find Records and Replace Records

Finding Records in a Large Database:

• In the last section you created a school and a movie database with only a few records.
• In this section lesson you will be finding records in a database that has already been created.

Small database: finding a student in a database with only 30 students is very easy.

Large database: in a large database you may have to search through thousands of records. If the records are not in alphabetical order it may be easy to miss what you are looking for and have to start all over.

Edit/Find: you can use the Edit and Find feature to locate certain records eg. Philip - the name of a student

Potential Problems: if the spelling is not correct, for example if it is spelled Phillip (with 2 L's) you won't locate the record. Entering Phil won't work either

A solution to this problem is to use wildcards, instead of entering Phil you may enter Phil* in the Edit / Find dialogue box

Phil, Philip and Phillip would then all show up (the * means anything may appear after the Phil portion)

In Microsoft Access when you are doing a Edit / Find you have to be sure that you are selecting the correct field (you don't want to look up Phil* in the LastName field as it won't be found there-it is in the FirstName field).

Problem: lets assume you are working on a database with names and addresses of 500,000 clients for a large international business and you find out that some of the cities of some of your clients are getting a new telephone area code.

Solution (Edit/Replace): you could use the Edit/Replace to replace the old area code eg. 604 with a new one eg. 250, instead of going through all the records and replacing each one (this may be thousands of replacements)

In the above solution you would have to be careful not to accidentaly change all of your records to 250!! This could be disasterous.

Disaster Lurking:If there were 30 or 40 different area codes in a database and you accidentally changed all 500,000 of them all to the area code of "250", most of them would be incorrect. If a company utilized a database to make calls daily, this could be a financial disaster for a company.

This is why backups of databases are made continually.

Backups For Important Large Company Databases:

• Computer database files may be backed up in a seperate folder on a computer, but what if that computer's hard drive breaks--you are toast, if you are the database administrator you may even be fired

• Computer database files may be backed up on another computer for extra security
  • however if a virus infects the network this computer may become corrupt as well
  • an employee may also hack in and destroy a file

• Computer files may be stored on a CD to eliminate the risk of viruses (however CD's can be stolen so they should be locked up in a safe)

• What if there is a fire in the office and all copies of the CD and the computers are damaged beyond repair (if this is the headquarters of a multimillion dollar company this may bring the company to bankruptsy)

• Offsite storage is recommended for large databases so that if one location suffers damage (think of New Orleans) than there is a hard copy somewhere else (eg. in a safe at another branch)

• Data changes constantly as it is being updated, so these copies of backed up data need backed up daily or weekly

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