[AccessD] This on Sharepoint

Charlotte Foust cfoust at infostatsystems.com
Tue Jun 5 12:57:51 CDT 2007


It's more a condemnation of SharePoint than it is of Access, John.

Charlotte Foust 

-----Original Message-----
From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of jwcolby
Sent: Tuesday, June 05, 2007 10:52 AM
To: 'Access Developers discussion and problem solving'
Subject: [AccessD] This on Sharepoint

I just found this on a blog re Access 2007.  Since I don't use it, I
can't comment except to say, if it is true... OH MY GOD!

************************************************************

 Wednesday, October 11, 2006 2:13 AM by Mike

Do you know how data will be stored in SharePoint (SP) if you use SP as
an Access data store?  

In SP there is only ONE table that your data will be stored in.  That's
right, if your Access program has 5 tables (or a hundred tables) stored
in SharePoint, then data from the 5 (or 100) tables is intermingled into
ONE table.  The data table in SP is called UserData.

UserData is predefined by M$ to have 201 columns: 64 nvarchar(255), 16
int,
32 float, 16 datatime, 16 bit, 1 guid, 32 ntext, and 8 sql_variant (plus
16 non-user SP internal use columns).

So if you define a table in Access that has one integer column, and one
varchar(10) column and store it in SP, the table really has 201 columns
(but in this case only two columns will be used for your data).

There a few house keeping tables that SP uses, one is called Lists.
Lists is where your column names are stored.  So there is a map between
your column names and the predefined SP columns names of UserData.
Every time your data is read the map also needs to be read so that SP
can send the data to Access with the correct column names.  

The real columns names of UserData are (you guessed it): nvarchar1,
nvarchar2 - nvarcahr64, int1 - int16, float1- float32, datatime1 -
datatime16, bit1 - bit16, guid1, ntext1 - ntext32, sql_variant1 -
sql_variant8.

The rows of your table will be intermixed with rows from all other
tables and all SP "lists".  I'm not making this up!

Wow, all I can say is WOW WHAT A CLUGE!  It is boggling to even try to
think of the performance and interaction problems that can arise from
such an outright wacky scheme.

If you want to use SP with Access, there should be a big bold warning:

WARNING, STORING ACCESS DATA IN SHAREPOINT WACKY, IF YOU REALLY WANT TO
DO THIS, FIRST GO TO THE PHYSIATRIST TO CONFIRM THAT YOU ARE CRAZY.
THEN IF YOU ARE CERTIFIED CRAZY, ITS OK, YOU CAN MAKE IT WORK, JUST BE
SURE THAT YOU DON'T STORE MORE THAN A FEW ROWS OF SIMPLE DATA AND FOR
BEST PERFORMANCE DON'T ALLOW THE SHAREPOINT SERVER TO BE USED FOR
ANYTHING OTHER THAN YOUR JUMBLED UP PSEUDO TABLES.

Note, if you have virtual arrays of octal-hyper 100Ghz processors with
100Gs of memory (like the M$ Access team) you may find that storing
Access data in the SharePoint pseudo tables may actually work during
testing.  Use real data on real systems at your own risk.

Using SharePoint for Access data storage will be as useful as Microsoft
Bob.

************************************************************

Does anyone out there know anything about this?

John W. Colby
Colby Consulting
www.ColbyConsulting.com 

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