RE: Oracle - MS Access - Does your company have a policy about local vs. centralized data storage? (Perhaps a bit off topic?)

Access (and excel) has been the bane of one of my clients existence, as many bad reports have come out of them, and while they are not banned they are highly discouraged and are being replaced by a central oracle data warehouse that I built. Once a data mart is built for a purpose that an access database was used for in the past any feeds that were used to supply data into access is stopped, hopefully forcing people to use the warehouse.

We store data at our most granular level in the data marts and we use business objects as a front end tool while it has numerous flaws, one of them works to our advantage. Out of the box it does support exporting to a text file so data has to be aggregated to some degree before it can be extracted as excel still only support 65k rows.

We discourage access databases by not supporting their reports. While this was a drastic measure, it was necessary as some diehards used to say that the warehouse was wrong and their access reports were correct which made management reluctant to use the warehouse. And after repeated validations of the warehouse and deciphering and disproving of the access data and reports all the diehards either quit or switched to the warehouse.

One of the first datamarts, originally built using SAS, found a reporting issue that correct a several basis point error that had been accumulation over the 14 year history of the company and added $6 million to the bottom line for that year; paying for the warehouse project for that and many years to come.

Ken Naim

-----Original Message-----

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Robert Freeman
Sent: Wednesday, July 04, 2007 2:33 PM
To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: Oracle - MS Access - Does your company have a policy about local vs. centralized data storage? (Perhaps a bit off topic?)

I'm trying to do a bit of research in my effort to put together a project to move from localized to centralized data storage for Access applications and other ODBC type things. I'm just wondering if any of you have any related policies at your companies? Do you allow localized Access data stores or do you centralize those data stores? I'm looking at allowing access applications, but providing a means to easily request/create a data store for those applications in Oracle.

Thoughts?

RF

Robert G. Freeman
Oracle Consultant/DBA/Author
Principal Engineer/Team Manager
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http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l Received on Wed Jul 04 2007 - 20:46:50 CDT