Access & Performance Analyzer

[Lee Redfern]

Ran the Access Performance Analyzer on MY "ALL_HX4" table and it made the following suggestions: "Change data type of field 'tPGM' from 'Text' to 'Long Integer'", and "Change data type of field 'tPOST' from 'Text' to 'Date/Time'". I have NOT made those suggested changes yet, and my question is should and can I safely do that or NOT? Anyone who knows the answer to this, please let me know. Thanks,

[hurrikane]

Lee,
do not make the changes. You may not have any 1A or 2B in the tPGM field yet so Access does not know it should be text.

As for the tPOST. it thinks that should be a time fields. changing that would let you sort on time, not sure if you can do that now because of the am/pm.

[Rick]

You can try changing tPOST, but my feeling is there is a reason we put it in there that way.

Try changing it and see what results you get. If you like it better keep your change. If you don't like it change it back.

I think there was a problem with sort order but its been too long ago to remember.

[MikeDee]

I have tpost set to time in my hx4 table and it works fine. I use it everyday since when I am home I make my plays from my queries which are sorted in post time order. This works great in contests with multiple tracks to make selections from.

If you don't use the field to sort on , it does not matter if it is date/time or text.

If you want to use time in Access to sort be sure that you set the time zone in HTR2 for your time zone. This way the export will have all post times set for your time and not the time zone of the track.

There are 2 problems with post times in access.

If you are in the east and want to enter tracks in the west the run at might like LA you will have a problem with races that go off after midnight. These races come will have a AM time so if you sort they will show up first. To be correct you would need the date changed to the next day, then they will sort correctly.

The second problem is with tracks in IN and TUP that do not change to daylight savings time in the summer. These will be off by 1 hour based on how you set your time zone in access. This can be overcome by running a update query in access to correct the time for these tracks.

Should this ever be an issue with anyone I can post how to do this update query.