Multivalued fields

• This is a very specific characteristic attached to the RDBMS included with GLOBUS / T24 ( Universe or J-Base?).

Surprisingly, this data-type is coming with latests release of Oracle, MS-Access 2007,…Premonitory?

• It consists into creating multiple occurrences of a field. From a user point of view, it means simply defining and attaching a new field or a brand new table to an existing table.

If you consider a DB table having 2 dimensions: 1 for fields list, 1 for fields records when populated, you can consider Multivalued fields as a third dimension.

Technically speaking, a multivlued field is just a field that contain multiple data separated by a specific character (Value Marker) e.g. on the DB physical layer, multi-dimensional fields are not even considered. Only application programs are showing one field content (data delimited with a specific character) as multiple ones.

• There’s no need of DBA’s maintenance to create this, or even RDBMS stopping to take new Multivalued fields into account, it’s fully in an end-user control.

Example:

• The counterparts data file is called “CUSTOMER” in GLOBUS / T24.

A list of around 30 attributes is available in the standardtable to qualify a counterpart/client. Because this is clearly not sufficient in most cases,  an empty occurrence of Multivalued fields is provided to complete the definition. Each occurrence of this multivalued field becomes a new attribute itself. And there’s no limitation in the number of occurrences.

• This gives the ability to describe a counterpart/client using 100 or more different attributes (geographical region, marketing segment, marital status, age segment, profile of management or whatever) by simply clicking on occurrences!