I have an opinion question relating to deleting important records in a
human resources database. Any "best practices" papers or "white
papers" anyone know of would help tremendously.

Here is the scenario: A new employee is hired and goes through unpaid
training on premises waiting on security clearance. The employee fails
security clearance and is dismissed. Our personnel department wants to
delete this record.

My philosophy is that the record should not be deleted but rather a
field should be created "tagging" such hires as "Hired-Failed-
Security" so that queries and reports will not list them as an active
employee but the record will remain in the database. Cascading delete
problems could arise too.

Our personnel department wants such records totally out of the
database. I disagree.

Any opinions on this? Any sources I could go to to get any "best
practices" papers or "white papers" on this?

thanks!!!

Brockus Wade

This is not a database question. It is a question of what is the best
business practice, i.e. whether a company ought to/needs to use the database
to keep a history of people who tried out but did not join the staff of the
company.

There are business reasons why a company might want to keep such records
(e.g. to save time if the person applies again later.) IMHO, if your job is
IT or DBMA, your responsibility is to point out how it might help the HR
department to have the data, and also the cost of keeping that data
(additional complexity in design and maintenance), so the HR people can make
an informed decison.

--
Allen Browne - Microsoft MVP. Perth, Western Australia
Tips for Access users - http://allenbrowne.com/tips.html
Reply to group, rather than allenbrowne at mvps dot org.

<brockuswade (AT) yahoo (DOT) com> wrote