bob lambert wrote:
> I have MS SQL Server 2000 w/ my
> developers toolkit (and admit I don't know what
> the heck good it is !). Why not use that and
> build a web site ? If I hope to have lots of
> concurrent users is that the reason to get out of
> MS-dom ?
Well the advice to not use Access in a web application is sound. Access does not deal as well with many users concurrently using a database as SQL Server or MySQL does. Having many concurrent users is not necesscarily a reason to leave 'MS-dom' as it is to leave Access for some other RDBMS.
Of course, there are reasons to switch from Access to MySQL, as listed in the article. Performance and the freedoms that come with using Open Source software come to mind.
> So I am concerned about the amount of work
> to convert all that stuff. Also, my app dumps
> output to printer or to MS Excel, so if I leave MS
> access will I lose that ability ?
Moving from a Windows Forms application to an ASP based one is quite a step. Depending on how your wrote your VB app you may be looking at extensive reprogramming to move your application to the web. Dumping to Excel would depend on how this was achieved in VB, you may well be able to dump to Excel and have the user download the newly created excel file.
>And of
> course the other obvious concern is speed. I
> already have split my db to a data back-end and
> code/form front end, but am not sure how using the
> internet and this split will work. Only
> experience I had was a DB that we used at work
> which was MS Access. Tried to run it over a lan
> w/ folks south of the border and it did not work
> well (very slow).
>
In this case there is not much concern, your users will not be accessing the database itself over the internet with a web app, just the web pages that form the interface. As such performance should be vastly improved over your last experience.
Even when using MySQL over the internet you should see better performance, as MySQL is well suited for TCP/IP access (though you should looks at something like SSH tunneling to protect your information).
> Could I get started (using friends as guinea pigs)
> by making my home pc the server that my users
> (very limited trial group to start) could
> essentially log into ?
>
I don't see why not.
Mike Hillyer, Technical Writer
MySQL AB, www.mysql.com
Office: +1 403-380-6535
Blog:
http://www.openwin.org/mike
"The Open Source movement has become a major force across the software industry, and MySQL is the world's most popular open source database."
--Fortune Magazine