Re: Access 2000 Front End

From: Daniel A. Morgan <damorgan_at_exxesolutions.com>
Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2001 00:37:09 +0000
Message-ID: <3C2678B5.28055F81_at_exxesolutions.com>


Your mistake was in the concept of what you have done. If you could use Access2000 as a front-end you probably didn't need Oracle. Should have just stuck the entire thing into Access. VB is a little better but .... Why didn't it occur to anyone that if they needed Oracle as the back-end they should have front-ended the application with Oracle Forms and Reports or XML or something robust and secure?

Rant finished. I would definitely scrap the Microsoft ODBC driver and download the latest compatible driver from Oracle.

Then give serious consideration to dumping Access or dumping Oracle. One of them is being misused.

Daniel A. Morgan

harold_at_net.net wrote:

> I would appreciate some advice as to where we may have gone wrong on
> this project and what we should look at to get things back on track.
>
> Over the past several months we have developed a medium sized (20
> tables, largest 150,000 rows, 4 with 20-60K rows, 10 forms, 20
> reports, 6-10 users) application to store data relating to our
> employee and retiree company paid medical benefits. Info is sent
> weekly to the insurance companies that administer the plans.
>
> We are using Oracle 8i as the backend. After some discussion at the
> start it was decided to use Access 2000 front-end. We had some people
> with VB over Oracle experience and could have gone that way also, but
> management felt Access would be faster development and they wanted us
> to be done by Christmas.
>
> Well anyway, we are almost finished, I feel the database is well
> normalized, we used all linked tables and links to Oracle Views via
> Oracle ODBC driver.. We have been testing with full blown data and
> most of the time it works very well (even some praise given to the
> development team at the holiday office party).
>
> Well of course the day after the party, bad things start to happen.
> In a nutshell, when tabbing or mousing field to field on a subform the
> main form moves to a different record; sometimes, but less frequently,
> it even happens when selecting a new value from a combo box on the
> main form itself; we are doing almost everything bound, the data
> source is a query joining 2 tables of approx 60K rows each. We saw
> stuff like this a month ago when one of the clients was WIN98; we got
> all of the cleints WIN2K and it went away (until today). This seems
> to be intermittent, it doesn't happen all the time, and I have a
> seat-of-the-pants feeling that it starts happening when the network is
> a little slow. We are deployed over the company WAN, all on the same
> campus within .25 mile, NT Server or Oracle 8i, WIN2K clients, shared
> mdb file on a different NT Server.
>
> I have been told that we should not be sharing the Access executable,
> to keep a copy on each cleint; we will try that next.
>
> Any idea what we should look at next, or have a consultant look at, or
> was it a bad choice from the start with Access 2K, bound forms, Oracle
> ODBC etc.?
>
> Hal Schoppman
> hjlsXXspam_at_optonline.net
Received on Mon Dec 24 2001 - 01:37:09 CET

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