[WEB4LIB] Re: Microsoft Access

[Darryl Friesen]

"When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

Access is a hammer.

It's probably an OK database to use as a backend, but it certainly wasn't
designed to do what you want, and I don't think you'll ever be satisfied with
just it, nor the Word mailmerge approach suggested (now you have two hammers).

If your webserver is NT I'd suggest looking at active server pages.  They'll
let you do the update/edit forms, as well as generating pages and doing
searches on the fly.

If you really want static pages, then your best bet is a (custom) program (so
you have real control over the look and functionality of the resulting pages)
that can access the database either directly or via ODBC.  Perl for Win32
springs to mind (and it's free).

If your server is Unix, then I'd dump Access in favor of something that works
better on that platform, like mSQL or mySQL (both relational databases,
relatively low cost, might be free for educational institutions) and again
using a custom (Perl) application to build the pages.  You may be able to
query the Access db from the Unix box via ODBC.  I've never had a need, so I
can't say how well, or even if, that works.


- Darryl

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   Darryl Friesen, B.Sc., Programmer/Analyst    Darryl.Friesen at usask.ca
   Consulting & Development                     http://gollum.usask.ca/
   Department of Computing Services                 163 Murray Building
   University of Saskatchewan                              Main Library
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  "The Truth Is Out There"