Johnny G said:
Forgive my ignorance and the simplicity of the question, but why can't the
BCM files (mdf & ldf) be moved to a shared folder on the server? Give one
person admin rights to the files, and share with all other users (assuming
BCM is installed on all workstations)?
Thanks.
PS Could BCM data data be accessed remotely either via OWA or VPN? Thanks
Executive summary: You will break SQL server that way.
Those files comprise SQL server data store. The data files must be attached
to an instance of SQL server.
SQL server is a multi-user relational database management system or RDBMS.
It has built-in data sharing and highly scalable multi-user access. I can
have 10,000 users hit this server simultaneously. As you can see, for a
system to sustain that kind of load, only one set of files can exist that
the RDBMS then provides access to through a standard interface.
SQL server works by writing data (or transactions as we call them) to LDF
files (they are the transaction logs) first and then to MDF files. LDF files
get modified with each full backup. Other RDBMSs such as Oracle enable us
(or at least used to) to write data to raw hard disks where it is impossible
to see the data at the file system level. Microsoft chose to make life
easier for us and enabled the storage of the data files at filesystem level.
Just because you can see these files does not mean that you should access
them in any way except when moving detached database files to a new SQL
instance. Otherwise, your access is limited to ODBC and OLE DB tools and
utilities such as OSQL.
BCM v2 enables easy multi-user database sharing from inside the application.
I wrote the explanation above to explain why it cannot be done any other
way.
By the way, this theoretically means that I can put a BCM database on a high
powered SQL Server and use it for far larger tasks than what you'd expect,
such as perhaps connect it to the OLAP server or access it with over 10
concurrent users...
If you want, you can make some of BCM's data available on the web through a
custom web application. You can access it over VPN if you know how to talk
to the BCM instance over VPN. Easiest way: set up the laptop in the office
to access BCM and then simply connect over VPN and continue as if nothing
happened.
