[AccessD] Combo Box RowCount

Arthur:  Life is good.  Lots of travel with work these days.  Winnipeg, Regina and Saskatoon last week.  Vancouver next week.  Kelowna and Arlington, WA next week.  Home for the weekends though.
 
The application I wrote for the company is still in use and we hit 55 users last summer.  The Network Nazis updated or somehow changed the Server 2003 OS install so that all users dropped the FE-BE connection 3 times a day.  The change had something to do with how files are allocated and locked.  After a few months of emails to Help Desk by a small percentage of users I could get to make complaints, an attempt was made to revert to the previous server architecture, but with 160 servers and numerous attempts, they were unable to fix things.  We did some testing with as few as one or two users logged in and the connection still dropped.
 
After much gnashing of teeth, pointing of fingers and general excitement and in recognition of the fact that the application is mission critical, we were finally granted permission to upsize the back end to SQL Server.  A team of 3 programmers was to be assigned to the task that was anticipated to take 2 months to complete.  Another two months and nothing happened in that regard.  Ultimately, in October, I was given ODBC access and some IT fellow ran the upsize wizard on the BE and I was given 3 days to make things work.  I wasn't given any access to SQL Server development tools.  In fact, the upsize wizard made some numeric field size choices poorly and I had to scramble to figure out how to change things.  My only means of updating table design at this point is to open Excel to get to Microsoft query and write table modifying SQL from there.  I haven't found a way to do this from Access yet.  This has been a bit of a learning curve for me as I've always had access to a visual table design interface in the past.
 
Bottom line is that after the 3 days, they new system was rolled out.  I had to add the 'dbSeeChanges' parameter, switch or option in many hundreds of places, and 'Between' no longer worked in some of the Access SQL I had written.  Those were rewritten to '>= and <='.  A few other things broke but it really wasn't too bad.  We are no longer seeing the dropped connection between FE and BE and I believe that everything now works.  I had to fix the odd reported problem via a VPN connection over the following weeks from wherever I found myself.  Since then I've added some new reports and made some minor incremental development changes for data we are newly tracking.
 
I enquired about having some tools and an ADO connection, but these are not going to be provided.  The amount of work involved in switching from an Access BE using DAO to SQL Server using an ODBC connection was really limited.  I didn't need any reference books and only did a few Google searches to get what I needed.  It seems to me that performance has slipped by 20 to 50% but even so, it is entirely acceptable.  If I had to do it over, I doubt it would take me more than a day to upsize using ODBC.  Of course, to do it right and skipping the ODBC layer would have taken much longer.Ciao 
Jürgen Welz 
Edmonton, Alberta 
jwelz at hotmail.com> Date: Sat, 24 Jan 2009 12:15:21 -0500> From: fuller.artful at gmail.com> To: accessd at databaseadvisors.com> Subject: Re: [AccessD] Combo Box RowCount> > Thanks, Jurgen. Haven't seen you here in a while. What's new?> > Arthur
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