Access 2000 Front End
Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2001 06:12:54 GMT
Message-ID: <3c26c33d.2911971_at_news-server.optonline.net>
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 - 07:12:54 CET