Oracle access via EXCEL

 A good plan is to adopt a PC based solution which means running SQL*Net in your PC to get to the Sun Unix machine. Use the TCP/IP drivers. I worked on a project which did this using Excel 3 and Windows 3.0 and the Pioneer Q+E drivers in the PC.
Note that the connection can be two way - you can update the database from the spreadsheet, although doing this regularly may reveal some sloppy system design.
If you wish to summarise a low of data, it is better to do this as a Group By query in the Unix Box and save the result in a table. You can run cron jobs overnight if you want to summarise the business.  

The word at the Oracle OpenWorld in Melbourne last week was that Oracle Glue works well, usually better than ODBC for large queries, but not a vast difference for small amounts of data. Glue is DLLs called from within Windows, my own experience relates to loading the TCP/IP drivers in Dos before starting Windows.

Bye for now... Received on Tue Nov 15 1994 - 22:26:18 CET