On 11/27/2012 05:06 PM, David Bolen wrote: > I went through a very similar transition a few years ago from > standalone Access databases (with GUI forms, queries and reports, as > well as replication) to a pure web application with full reporting > (albeit centrally designed and not a report designer for users). > > I suppose my best overall suggestion is to migrate the data first and > independently of any other activities. > <snip> > Having done this, you are then free to start implementing, for > example, a web based application to start taking over functionality.
Very informative post, David. This is the only practical way forward, and had I not been away from the field so long (been a couple of years since I was in such a position of doing this professionally), I would have remembered this! MS Access is a very powerful tool; it just has a lousy default database engine. ODBC isn't a perfect interface, but Access does speak it, and so does a real DBM like PostgreSQL. There are a number of tools out there for converting an access database to SQL schema (if you don't have access to the schema). I used it on a commercial program once to check on their database parameters (shudder using mdb in a production program!), and actually had a script to sync it to read from it via ODBC and push it to a MySQL database. All this reminds me of a project I wanted to do, but hit a road block. My problem was I had a proprietary binary app, with an MDB data file (in the program directory no less). I'd like to share it across users, without worrying about corrupting the database, or even have a web front end. If I could set it up as David suggests with some kind of live mirroring, and so that the program didn't know it was a database server it was talking to, that would be good. But I had no control over the ODBC parameters (they were hard coded in the program). Would have loved to have separated out the access database part from the rest of the program though. I could then graft on a web front end. thanks again for the post, David. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
