Help With Setup Solution

[Richard]

Hello there,

I'd just like some feedback on what the best way to put together what
I'm trying to do.

I have designed an access 2003 application that runs at home. We keep
a list of the products as they are entered on my local machine at
home.

However, visitors to our site will be able to enter the contact
details and the products that they are searching for (the list of
available products changes often!) Their product requirements are
stored in 3 related tables.

My plan originally was to ship out 3 local related tables to be hosted
by the Internet Server (external web host).

The idea was that when we came to do a match (every couple of days?) a
procedure would start where Access would look up (somehow) the 3
tables on the internet server and (leaving the data there) perform the
match of visitors/potential customers and their requirements (from
the internet) to products available (in my office) and automatically
send out an SMS to these people.

Now this app works in the office while all the tables are local. (This
is not an SMS question.)

What would be the most reliable and most efficient way to do this. And
the pitfalls of what I am trying to recommend. At present everything
works as everything is local. But I'm worried about the whole thing
falling down.

Any recommendations (even using a larger scale solution) for how best
to handle this? Would I be better off moving those 3 tables to SQL
and hosting them? Or upscaling the whole back end to sql. Should I
get a dotnet application designed?

Look forward to hearing from you?

Thanks

Richard
(remove the xxnospampleasexx from my address to email me!)

 

[Armen Stein]

Hello there,

I'd just like some feedback on what the best way to put together what
I'm trying to do.

I have designed an access 2003 application that runs at home. We keep
a list of the products as they are entered on my local machine at
home.

However, visitors to our site will be able to enter the contact
details and the products that they are searching for (the list of
available products changes often!) Their product requirements are
stored in 3 related tables.

My plan originally was to ship out 3 local related tables to be hosted
by the Internet Server (external web host).

The idea was that when we came to do a match (every couple of days?) a
procedure would start where Access would look up (somehow) the 3
tables on the internet server and (leaving the data there) perform the
match of visitors/potential customers and their requirements (from
the internet) to products available (in my office) and automatically
send out an SMS to these people.

Now this app works in the office while all the tables are local. (This
is not an SMS question.)

What would be the most reliable and most efficient way to do this. And
the pitfalls of what I am trying to recommend. At present everything
works as everything is local. But I'm worried about the whole thing
falling down.

Any recommendations (even using a larger scale solution) for how best
to handle this? Would I be better off moving those 3 tables to SQL
and hosting them? Or upscaling the whole back end to sql. Should I
get a dotnet application designed?

Look forward to hearing from you?

Thanks

Richard
(remove the xxnospampleasexx from my address to email me!)

Hmm. There's a lot to consider here.

Although some people have been successful using Access for a web site,
we don't. We use SQL Server for this.

1) You could put all the data into SQL Server on your web server and
build an Access front-end MDB to maintain the data. You would need to
use client-server techniques to optimize performance over a slower
connection. Just using linked tables for everything might not be
sufficient.

2) You could continue with keeping the office data and web data
separate, but then you'll need to synchronize the two periodically. To
do this, you can copy the whole database, but you'll need to think
about how to makes changes in both directions. And if you want to
replace the whole database on the site after your changes, what about
changes that web users have made while you were synchronizing?

If we were doing this project, we would probably use option 1, but it
also depends on how much local processing your application needs to
do.

Armen Stein
Microsoft Access MVP
www.JStreetTech.com