[AccessD] have some fun

Jurgen Welz jwelz at hotmail.com
Wed Apr 9 19:08:11 CDT 2008


I'm tempted to jump in at TR but don't want to subscribe to anything.  I've had this Hotmail address since 286 processors with 40 meg hard drives were state of the art and there is no time to subscribe to a bunch of internet groups and this TR thing looks like a waste of time.  I did however give the article and follow up posts a read.
 
In the past I did everything I could to cut down on network traffic including denormalizing data, yet used bound forms where possible.  I used to get data file corruptions about twice a year, and the culprit was nearly always a memo field.  Now I do maintenance and occasional enhancements in the application for the company while I make my real money in another capacity still with the same company.  The core application hasn't changed much in the past 5 or 6 years though I would love to migrate to a more robust form of data storage.  We have not had a corruption of data in the last 12 months even though several of the offices have lost connections to the server pool over the past year.  Our Edmonton office with 16 users has lost connection about 2ce per month for the last 6 months due to what is likely some unresolved hardware problem.
 
When I started, we had to deal with an overbearing IT department that locked users out of everything.  There was no way to get a file onto or off of the system.  There were locks in the floppy drives and on the cases to secure the hard drives.  Email was severly restricted in terms of attachments.  We couldn't change the start menu, the desktops, resolution or time on our workstations or laptops.  My division was told that the software developers would get to my division's needs in 6 or 7 years.  It is now 12 years later and they haven't touched our business needs, though they always have looked after payroll and other aspects of the business.  They have had SQL Server of some version available, but no person in our division has the ability to anything to interface with the data other than what has been provided.
 
We started with 4 or 5 users on our Access application and are today up to 54.  We have 8 offices in Washington, British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba and not a single user in our division resides in the office housing the servers we use.  The parent company currently runs 105 servers in a central location.  I did a rough count of terminals on the equipment report and there are over 1500 listed.
The access data file is not huge at about 55 megabytes, but what that really means is there is greater likelihood of page lock conflicts.  The Access application is still far faster than a SQL Server backed version because of the overhead and the overall greater data volume I'd need to pull from and of course, the better normalization.  There are presently 210 linked tables and 131 forms/subforms in the Access application.
 
It is not a trivial application.  Although our division is relatively small, doing about 55 million in construction last year, we are continuing to grow and this application drives the entire business.  The reports and documents generated and managed via the application represent over 85% of all the paper processed by the business, the other 15% being managed by software developed by our parent company.  We have had people hired who have come from larger corporations who can't believe how structured our processes are and the ease of access to any required information.  A few years ago we were presented an award by the Saskatchewan construction industry for innovation for the things we have done with this application.
 
The president of the parent company and I had a chat about 10 years ago and he told me that our application was a cadillac but that they needed a railway and he has a point.  Access could never support those 1500 terminals, but, we have power steering, GPS, climate control, music, no clickety clack, a smooth ride and anything we feel we need.  The biggest difference is that we can pick a road and get very close to where we need to go since we don't have to haul 100 rail cars.  They can ride the rail to the nearest station and then they are on their own.  Our 55 million is a drop compared to the 1.5 billion they do and their agenda is quite different from ours.  It is not in the cards that they will ever meet the capabilities we feel we need.
 
I would love to do a fully normalized SQL version of this application and will probably need to do so within the next couple of years as we are likely going to reach 100 users in the next 3 years.  What I hate is the fact that we will likely be doing a double entry system, theirs and ours, as I doubt we will ever have application access to their data.  The only reason we have Access at all is because "it's just a file".  Amen.
 
CiaoJürgen WelzEdmonton, Albertajwelz at hotmail.com> From: ssharkins at gmail.com> To: accessd at databaseadvisors.com> Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2008 15:59:50 -0400> Subject: Re: [AccessD] have some fun> > I wish some of you Access advocates would join the discussion. :) > > Susan H. 
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