Dry Cleaners, Canoes, and Pigs in a Cadillac

I have a handful of analogies that explain my database design philosophy. Some came from colleagues and mentors, some are my own. Here are three of my favorites.

Three Functions of a Dry Cleaners — Three Functions of a Database Application

A properly designed, three tier Access database application bears a remarkable resemblance to a dry cleaners.

First you need a pleasant, efficiently laid out, user friendly interface. In a dry cleaners, that is the reception area and front counter. Customers are welcomed in by chrome, glass and potted plants. They interact with the counter person, dropping off new batches of dirty items and picking up clean ones. They usually get a receipt for their transaction, and use it again later to identify their dry cleaning for the cleaners to get it back.

That's pretty much how an Access interface works too. It facilitates data entry and reporting, i.e. the interactions with the data in the back end.

In the back of the dry cleaners you find the equipment and storage tubs, baskets, and  bins and the noisy, dirty cleaning machines you never want your customers to see.

And that's exactly how the tables and queries in an Access database work as well. You never want users to have to see them, but nothing works without them.

And between them, you find a transitional area where each customers items are grouped and sorted and moved from one container to another according to the rules established to manage it all.

In a well-designed Access database application, that's the job of the logic layer—the VBA and macros.

Yes, I know. It's not an ideal scaffold on which to hang the complexities of a properly designed database application. It is, nonetheless, a reasonably colorful picture of an Access database properly split into a Front End and Back End--with the preview of the logic layer that makes it all work.

So, if you will, an Access database application has a lot in common with a dry cleaners.

Paddling vs Floating in a Canoe

I got the canoe analogy from a fellow MS Access MVP. It’s a good way to explain why it's so important to do things "the Access Way". One of the most common problems we run across with Access is the misguided application of Excel spreadsheet experience to relational databases like Access.

Access is remarkably flexible and forgiving. It’s possible, for better or worse, to make it perform amazingly complex feats using “spreadsheet style” tables and sticky wads of Macros or VBA. Things like Repeating Groups of fields in a table, or even multiple tables containing segmented data (e.g. “tblSales2017”, “tblSales2018”, “tblSales2019”) are not only possible, but even, with enough effort and ingenuity, quite workable.

As the saying goes, just because you can do something, that doesn't mean you should do it. And that leads to the analogy of a trip in a canoe.

If you go upstream in a canoe, against the current, you’ll spend all of our time paddling. 

If you go downstream in a canoe, with the current, you only need the paddle to steer. 

Access, of course, is the canoe in this analogy and the development tools—tables, queries, VBA and reports—are the paddles.  If you want to work less, you’ll learn and follow the best design principles. Normalized relational tables, forms with subforms, and so on. Use them to steer, not to paddle against the current.

Pigs in a Cadillac

One of my favorite stories concerns pigs, Cadillacs and the surprising rarity of common sense. And not just in the design of Access database applications. This story goes back to the very start of my career with Access.

The original version of this story involved the wisdom of buying a Cadillac to transport pigs.

I was a member of a team tasked with evaluating software applications for a large financial enterprise.  Two main contenders emerged in the search. One was a modest Windows based package that came with a mid-five figure license fee. The other one had, as my friend Armen likes to say, an additional zero on the right end of the price tag. One of the analysts responsible for the evaluation feared we were going to choose the Cadillac version, so she offered this little story to encourage the common sense choice.

Here's the story.

You have raised a herd of pigs which you need to get to market. It's time to acquire a vehicle to haul them there. A visit to the local auto dealer, though, presents a bit of a puzzle. On the dealer's lot you find two vehicles big enough to do the job. One is a used pickup truck with a stake bed suited almost perfectly to hauling farm animals. The other is a brand-new full size Cadillac Escalade with plenty of room for a handful of pigs—after a few modifications of course. The price tags of those two vehicle options also differ by a zero, as you probably already guessed.

So, the question for you: Do you want to have the prestige that goes with being able to haul pigs in the back of a brand-new Cadillac? Or should you humble yourself and buy a used pickup truck because it's better suited to the job (and cheaper to boot)?

Well, in that particular situation, the enterprise took ownership of a very nice Cadillac, and had it retrofitted with an appropriate pig holding enclosure, which came at a substantial additional premium over the original license fee 😁.

Unfortunately, in that case, common sense did not prevail.

Over the years, I've had more than one occasion to apply the moral of that story to other situations. Despite the temptation to haul my own pigs in a Cadillac, I have made a concerted effort to stick to the common sense choice as much as possible. It’s saved me a lot of embarrassment and effort, not to mention money.

Lately, answering questions on UtterAccess, I've been thinking about Pigs in a Cadillac a lot. It’s seductively easy to look for a clever way to write wads of code to do something that would be dead-simple, but boring, if you do it “the Access Way”. And that leads me to my final thought. There’s nothing heroic about writing wads of code to compensate for a poorly designed table schema or an elaborate interface.