Ad-hoc Queries

By creating queries, you can select, group, and list records that meet a set of conditions you define. Ad-hoc queries serve two main purposes. They are a quick way to see data filtered to your needs and they enable you to produce selections for use in other processes throughout the program. If you are quickly checking data, you may get all the information you need from the output fields you select in an ad-hoc query. Or you may want to drill into an actual record to view more detailed data. In this case, when you only want to explore your data — rather than feeding this list of records into some other process — the program presents the first 500 of the actual query results (rather than all of them) because it is not intended as a means of visiting each record individually in a large result set.

When you use query to produce a selection to be used by some other process, you are producing a set of IDs only. In many cases, you may create an ad-hoc query solely as a means of creating an accompanying selection. Although selections include no information about the records other than IDs, you can still pick a set of output fields in the query. This enables you to view a sampling of records so you can feel comfortable that the criteria you selected are accurate and the process will work on the records you intend. In this case, again only 500 of the actual query results display enough to provide you confidence in your query results.