Database Questions

[endgegner]

Hi guys,

My work is looking at purchasing some database services for our office. They're charging $6,000/yr which is way to expensive for our budget.

What we need this database to do is organize students/faculty/community partners based upon what the people do, contact info, number of hours worked, when they worked and additional involvement.

The program we looked at (http://www.servicelearningpro.com/) has the following highlights and comes highly recommended in our field:

Partner Module -- The partner module maintains the partner/agency profile and project list. Partners fill out a form on the "public" website that places their profile in a temporary record in the database. When complete database staff is notified by e-mail. Once the database staff approves the agency, the contact is provided access to the Control Panel where they can manage their projects and request "class matches." Partners have access to an orientation roster, student roster by project and student roster by project. They can also complete the student assessment on-line.
Faculty Module -- The faculty members are added by database staff. Once the faculty member is added they can manage their profile and classes through the Control Panel. They can request "project matches" from the list of approved agencies. Faculty determines how many projects students can "register" for in their classes.
Student Module -- Student profiles are added either through uploading the student records from a flat text file for added by the student if their profile is not found the first time they try to log in. Student information is archived by term so student "counts" can be kept on a historical basis.
Administrative Module -- SL administrators have full control of all modules. In addition, addition they have a web based html editor for all the pages on the public side of the system; e-mail message system that can e-mail to current and past participants depending on need (highly selectable); file upload system for documents, forms and pdf's.

Wondering if anyone knows of a (cheap) service to do some of these things (particularly the stuff we need) or if they have any advice/knowledge in this field. I'm recommending we just make an in-office database using Access, anyone agree? Thoughts?

 

[Bart]

Overall Access is a valid option. You could also create access forms to make the data input easier.
But, when you using access forms, you've the problem of redundant accessing.
You could avoid that by coding a lil program for users and use access just as a database ("secured" with a password).

Well, there's a reason why there are kiddy software like access and professional databases (Oracle, yes even SQL Server).
All depending on the amount of users, securtiy, amount of data volume and performance requirements.

Noone can recomment anything when you dont give any further information (data volume, how many users has to access the data, backuping, how important are the data, how important is the performance)


years ago i started a program with access as database lying on a file server. Time flew by and the database grew.
As queries slowed noticable down, i migrated to SQL Server which was the right choice. Just 3 users used it back then, creating several thousands entries a months (didnt want to create a Archiv-table, so all data had to be in the same table).

A SQL Server license aint that cheap, but there are also SQL Server express, which i never seriously used for a project. Maybe if the amoutn of data will be huge, the SQL Server Express is also an interesting option

 

[endgegner]

Noone can recomment anything when you dont give any further information (data volume, how many users has to access the data, backuping, how important are the data, how important is the performance)

sry m8 went into more detail on another forum,

In terms of data volume we're going to need to enter about 500 data entries (including name/contact etc) at start and that might expand by about ~100/yr. Data is not too important and not incredibly sensitive, to the point where we probably wouldn't consider putting a password on it. We want some of it to be able to be shared and easily accessible. Doing a backup probably wouldn't even be necessary more than once a year. In general only 3 or 4 people would be regularly accessing the database as well, so traffic-size is minimal.

 

[endgegner]

One of the things my boss wants is for 100's of people to be able to access it, but I'm not sure that's a good idea

 

[/\/uts]

fs dont use Access

 

[Thrasher (_!_)]

LAMP, WAMP, XAMPP etc ?

 

[yako]

xampp

 

[Bart]

One of the things my boss wants is for 100's of people to be able to access it, but I'm not sure that's a good idea

and how should all those people access it? Over the internet or are they in the cooperation network?

MySQL/XAMPP are ofc also possible, but imo not as easy as access / sql server.

 

[endgegner]

LAMP, WAMP, XAMPP etc ?

Because I'm not a noob and know what those are

 

[endgegner]

and how should all those people access it? Over the internet or are they in the cooperation network?

MySQL/XAMPP are ofc also possible, but imo not as easy as access / sql server.

All on the same network but my boss was considering purchasing these services for people to access it over the internet.

 

[Bart]

and that kicks access out. you cant access an access database over the internet in a reasonable way.
MySQL / XAMPP is so a good choice but then you need to spent some time to get backround knowledge if you never worked with it

2morrow i've a freeday, gonna test if it's posible with SQl Server 2008 Express too. Got curious now myself

 

[Thrasher (_!_)]

SQL Server Express is good for a database upto 4GB?
There are PHP (and probably ASP) scripts that allow editing/viewing databases including Access files from a web page i.e. across LAN / internet

 

[pinhead]

Not really sure where this discussion is going, but some things I would do/never do:

You should NEVER have a database (file or server) directly connected to the internet.
It's sooo unsafe...

There should always be an API to collect and interpret the data and let only that API be able to access the database itself.

You could then just change the way the API stores/collects the data from the database so you could switch from Access to MSSQL, or even to MySQL whenever there is the need for it.

Also the actual program (or webinterface) which is used to input the data won't need a single change, since it only interacts with the API and not the database itself.

See it like this:
[ application in Windows ] or [ application in Linux ] or [ webportal ] <--> [ API ] <--> [ Access db ] or [ MSSQL server ]

 

[endgegner]

Pinny

Thanks for the tip.

I'd like to consider finding a good frontend webapp interface for this because that would be really cool and make some things easier + my boss happy.

 

[endgegner]

SQL Server Express is good for a database upto 4GB?
There are PHP (and probably ASP) scripts that allow editing/viewing databases including Access files from a web page i.e. across LAN / internet

thx thrash m8. I don't see this database overcoming 4gb at any point in the 10 year future.

 

[Thrasher (_!_)]

Check out www.hotscripts.com

 

[Martz]

I use CakePHP framework and ExtJS for the database applications I write.

Check out ExtJS examples to give you an idea of the interfaces you can be provided with. Existing windows users will love it and people expecting plain web apps will be surprised.

As others have said, MS Access isn't the way to go. In most cases it's the wrong decision and very difficult to naturally share over the internet.

$6000 isn't a lot for software, for a laugh get quote from Salesforce and SAP who will quote you > $100k to manage your business data.