Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Appendix D. Obtaining or Creating the Sample
Database
The sample flat file “database,” as well as the Access database and the sample programs,
are all available for free download from the O'Reilly Internet site. You can choose from
any of the following methods to download the data that accompanies the topic:
Via the World Wide Web
The sample files are available from
ftp://ftp.ora.com/published/oreilly/windows/access.design2/CodeAccess3.zip.
Via an ftp client program
You can use an ftp client such as WS_FTP32 to ftp to
ftp.ora.com
, change to the
directory
published/oreilly/windows/access.design3/
, and get the file
example.zip
.
In each case, the sample files are stored in a single file compressed using the PKZip file
format. If you don't own a utility program capable of decompressing the software (or if
you're still doing these things from the command line), I highly recommend that you
download an evaluation copy of the shareware utility WinZip, from Nico Mak
Computing, Inc.; it is available at http://www.winzip.com.
EXAMPLE.ZIP
contains
LIBRARY_FLAT.DOC
(the flat database created with Microsoft
Word), as well as
LIBRARY95.MDB
(the sample Access database for Access for Office
95), and
LIBRARY97.MBD
(the sample Access database for Access for Office 97). (The
two versions perform optimally when using different file formats.) The
.mbd
file itself
contains the following:
The four tables (BOOKS, AUTHORS, PUBLISHERS, and BOOK/AUTHOR)
and their primary indexes
•
A code module,
Examples
, that contains all of the example programs from the
book
•
It does not, however, contain definitions of relationships, nor does it include any query
definitions. The book assumes that you'll be creating these from scratch.
If you don't have access to the Internet or to an email account from a service provider
with a gateway to the Internet, it is quite easy to create the sample files yourself. In the
remainder of this section, we'll guide you through the steps required to create each of the
tables in the Library database,
LIBRARY.MDB
.
