April 25, 2008 at 7:37 am
I have an Access 2007 adp file with forms that are bound to a SQL Express 2005 database. The Partner table has a PK field cleverly named PartnerID and it is an int identity(1,1) type. There are currently 1705 records in the table but the PartnerID is up to 17064. It occassionally skips ahead large blocks of values when creating new records.
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I know that the users are not creating, then deleting thousands of records at a time.
I know it doesn't really make much difference with respect to data integrity, but the customer is a little annoyed, and I'm curious about what's causing it. Or, at least, I'd like to get some guidance on how to go about querying the transaction log to figure out to troubleshoot the issue.
TIA
April 29, 2008 at 7:28 am
Is there a question you'd like us to answer? When you have an automatically assigned identity value as your PK, in Access you will occasionally have things happen that will cause 'gaps'... for instance, if you start to insert a block of records, and then cause them to be uninserted (either by rolling back or deleting), the PK values have been used and will not recycle.
April 30, 2008 at 10:46 am
Thanks for the reply.
I understand that transaction rollbacks will consume identity values, but there are no processes that are doing bulk inserts. And there are no transactions in any of the stored procs, triggers, etc.
I'm wondering how I might query the transaction log to see what events are causing the jumps to occur.
April 30, 2008 at 10:55 am
In access - it could be something as simple as starting to type in a form, and hitting cancel...
In SQL Server - things like SET IDENTITY_INSERT ON could easily help with setting up non-contiguous ranges, as might DBCC CHECKIDENT.
I guess in the bigger scheme of things - is this important? Identity values have no guarantee of staying contiguous, so expecting them to will just lead to disappointment. It looks to me that you have plenty of room to grow, so I'm not sure why it matters....
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Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?
April 30, 2008 at 2:06 pm
You're absolutely right. In the big scheme of things this means diddly. However, the PartnerID appears on reports, etc. and the customer doesn't like it. I explained that we're safe until we approach 2.2 billion.
I was mainly trying to get an answer to their question and satisfy my own curiosity. I've never seen anything like this happen in any other SQL Server app we've built, and this is the first time I've hooked an Access ADP app to a SQL Express db (again...it's what the customer wanted).
As for beginning to type in a form, and then hitting cancel...the values sometimes jump by thousands at a time, so that wouldn't explain it.
April 30, 2008 at 2:32 pm
kmerkle (4/30/2008)
You're absolutely right. In the big scheme of things this means diddly. However, the PartnerID appears on reports, etc. and the customer doesn't like it. I explained that we're safe until we approach 2.2 billion.I was mainly trying to get an answer to their question and satisfy my own curiosity. I've never seen anything like this happen in any other SQL Server app we've built, and this is the first time I've hooked an Access ADP app to a SQL Express db (again...it's what the customer wanted).
As for beginning to type in a form, and then hitting cancel...the values sometimes jump by thousands at a time, so that wouldn't explain it.
Oh - didn't want to sound like I was discounting the "client satisfaction score". Those can be hard to get around....
I'd check profiiler to see if anything is using the IDENTITY_INSERT option, that could easily screw things up....
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?
April 30, 2008 at 2:44 pm
I doubt it's something specific to Access on top of SQL. I administered an Access app on top of SQL Server for 6 years, and the only time identity fields skipped values is when I told it to, or for deletes/rollbacks.
Of course, it's always possible. All I can do is give my personal experience on it.
As far as looking into the logs go, RedGate has a free log parsing tool.
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April 30, 2008 at 3:34 pm
Frankly, this looks like someone is running manual tests on your table and then rolling-back or deleting the records.
Look for DELETES or ROLLBACKS in the log file. Also, if you have CreatedBy and CreatedDate fields, they will prove very useful here.
[font="Times New Roman"]-- RBarryYoung[/font], [font="Times New Roman"] (302)375-0451[/font] blog: MovingSQL.com, Twitter: @RBarryYoung[font="Arial Black"]
Proactive Performance Solutions, Inc. [/font][font="Verdana"] "Performance is our middle name."[/font]
April 30, 2008 at 3:39 pm
Some of the record sequences look very suspicious to me. In particular, I would check out the records with IDs: 7622 and 9012. Especially the second one (9012) as it really looks like a manual entry to me.
[font="Times New Roman"]-- RBarryYoung[/font], [font="Times New Roman"] (302)375-0451[/font] blog: MovingSQL.com, Twitter: @RBarryYoung[font="Arial Black"]
Proactive Performance Solutions, Inc. [/font][font="Verdana"] "Performance is our middle name."[/font]
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