Congratulations. You have just come to a design decision in Microsoft Access that bit me hard once.

Access puts DISTINCT on all queries by default. I learned this the hard way as a very junior programmer when I was trying to figure out the following. There was a table of receipts. The table was queried to find the sum of the receipts. Then it was queried to pull back information about the receipts to dump into Excel. As a first sanity check, the Excel dump was summed and came up with a different total than Access had given!

The problem was that the dump for Excel didn't include the primary key, so there were duplicate rows that were merged by Access. But those duplicate rows were not redundant information - the counts of how many you had were very important!

So there was a real life case where DISTINCT clearly is not the right thing to do.

Now with that said, I will read the book, but I'm not convinced that I will agree with it. My main problem with databases isn't that I encounter normalization problems or have trouble understanding the relational logic. It is that I am asked to do things with it that can't be expressed efficiently in a relational manner.

Perhaps you consider that an optimization problem, and lazily wave the database should take care of it. But I can't. I need to solve those problems, the database isn't taking care of it for me. In fact Oracle cheerfully tells me that they won't take care of it, and if I want to take care of it for myself, then I need to use their analytic extensions.

So while I'm willing to read their promotional literature, I'm not about to get the relational religion.

In reply to Re: (OT) Why SQL Sucks (with a little Perl to fix it) by tilly
in thread (OT) Why SQL Sucks (with a little Perl to fix it) by Ovid

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