posted Nov 14, 2009 9:59 AM by Buck Pyland
Still here. Big deal, I know.
That Access DB I talked about over a year ago is still there. I'm not doing much with it, someone else fields the questions from the business and asks me to look things up once in a while.
Nowadays, I get to manage a lovely product called webMethods. I've worked with it in the past, and it's still a pain in the ass. Don't get me wrong, it can be a great solution for interoperability, EDI and web services, but only if you do it right. You have to make sure that the resources you use are disposed of when, and at the point, you are done with them. If you leave anything behind, you're going to have problems. That's the best way I can explain it without getting technical.
Other than that, life is good.
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posted May 31, 2009 9:01 PM by Buck Pyland
A whole eight months between posts. Someone call the people at Guinness, we have a new record.
Anyway, I'm still alive, and I'll post more often as I have time. Stay tuned...
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posted Sep 27, 2008 2:14 PM by Buck Pyland
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updated Sep 27, 2008 2:17 PM
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Hey, kids. I survived Hurricane Ike. I didn't get too much damage, but it sure was loud. I could barely sleep through it. My neighborhood lost electric power for a couple of days, but we got it back. Others have certainly received more damage, especially in Galveston and areas close by, and my heart goes out to them.
To my family, if any of them should see this, I'm OK. Please don't try to contact me; there is nothing to contact me about. |
posted Sep 27, 2008 2:14 PM by Buck Pyland
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updated Sep 27, 2008 2:16 PM
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Welcome to the 586th version of my little ol' corner of the web. Google Pages and Page Creator are being discontinued in favor of Google Sites, so I have relocated to this new neighborhood. So far, it's not bad. We'll see how it goes.
I currently work on several applications at my company, one of which is a not so simple Access DB. It pulls in data from Excel, Oracle and, indirectly, SAP. It then crunches some numbers, displays reports and exports back to Excel. They really love Excel, PivotTables in particular, at my company (and by "my company", I mean "the company I work for"; I don't own it). I know Access can do PivotTables, but I'm nervous about letting users create objects in the DB. One big thing they want it to do in the future is to send data back to SAP. I told you it wasn't a simple Access DB.
I would love nothing more than to migrate this off of Access. My preference would be Oracle and PL/SQL for the DB and stored procedures, respectively, .NET for the GUI front-end and Business Objects for reporting and regurgitating to Excel. I would also consider ASP.NET as an alternative, or complementary, to the GUI.
I see this happening sooner rather than later for one reason, security. On an Access DB, it's virtually nonexistent. You can create workgroups, but they are a separate beast, entirely, and it's not integrated with Active Directory. The best you can do is to use file security on the MDB file itself. This means that if a user can get to the file, they can change anything, or even delete the whole MDB. Our compliance department would have kittens over this. We had two different initiatives to replace it over the years; both fell through. Maybe we'll finally get a real mandate from compliance, and finally have this not so simple Access DB shot, stuffed and mounted on the wall. |
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