Re: When MV is not an option
- From: "Glen B" <no$pamwebmaster@no$pamforallspec.com>
- Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2005 10:24:25 -0500
comments embedded
>>I have to agree with you there. I see no benefit to the customer in
>>using Access. The developer can benefit if they are the type of
>>consultant that likes to set something up quickly and then get be set
>>with consulting gigs for a long time.
>
> The same can be said for MV, and I've seen a lot of crappy MV
> applications where the end-user relies on their VAR/developer for
> everything. This is a matter of ethics and/or competence, and I don't
> think the tools are at fault. Don't get me wrong, I don't like MS
> Access, never have, but I think this emphasizes that good programming
> is an art and skill, and not just any monkey can do it well, even
> though a lot of monkeys can sell themselves as programmers for Pick,
> MS Access, MySQL, Postgres, SQL Server, etc. There are a multitude of
> excellent applications that use MS Access as their base, most of them
> single-user, I don't think we can discredit the lot of them for the
> bad apples that we've seen.
>
Forgot about the developers. I'm talking about using Access as a primary
corporate database. Try storing 3GB of data in an MDB and use it with Access
to run a business. I dunno how many times we've crashed Access due to so
much data being in one file. The MDB file was under 400MB, but it ran like
molasses and crashed more often than a stunt driver.
>>Additionally, I had this great interview with a decision support
>>professional at a university who was exporting data from UniData to
>>Access in order to do reporting. All of his reports ended up on Excel.
>> He didn't like his data out of synch with the live database, so first
>>they took a snapshot in UniData.
>>
>>So, the Access database was not the official source of the original
>>data, not the official source of the frozen data (i.e. data mart), and
>>not the tool for reporting. What was it? It was the data source for
>>Excel. Why? Because you have to do painful SQL with multivalue
>>systems in order to configure them as the "data source" from within
>>Excel. I've preached doing that but I'm not a believer anymore. Once
>>the office tools have something other than ODBC that can point at XML
>>data sources, hopefully the multivalue vendors will have the right API
>>so that works with PICK too. I'm getting off-topic, sorry.
>
> Do you believe there might be a market to do this using a tool like
> mv.NET? I hope there is. Excel is a powerful tool, not just a
> container for a grid as most people see it. It can import/export data
> in a lot of ways and then do great things with the data it has. As
> you know, I've done extensive coding into Excel and especially
> integration with MV. The problem I see is not lack of power in Excel
> or in MV, but that as soon as you tell a Pick developer that there are
> elegant ways to integrate MV with Excel, you get the "I can do that
> with AccuTerm" response. I'd maintain that such solutions are easy
> for developers and inadequate for end-users who then need to take the
> CSV files and perform the same reformatting operation on them every
> week or month. Why don't end-users complain? They've already asked
> for Excel integration and this is what they got - do they need to ask
> again? Most end-users aren't technologists - they believe this is the
> best that can be done because they don't know any better, so they
> accept it and go on about their manual reformatting activities. This
> is what perpetuates the false impression that Pick is primitive, and
> it only serves to further the demise of the market as people go on to
> find real solutions.
There is some truth to that. However, it's not the end-users' fault for
why Pick is seen as "primitive". It's seen as primitive because no one wants
to go outside of the box for a change. Heck, how many Pick shops _still_
don't have web or e-mail integration? What year is it now? sub-2006?
>
>>> What's so interesting to me, is that Microsoft has finally
>>> picked up on the same thing and is going to be releasing *real* small
>>> business software to fill the huge gap that MV has avoided for so many
>>> years. My little project is definately not going to be an issue when
>>> that
>>> happens. If the MV market doesn't get their stuff together, MS is going
>>> to
>>> run away with a LOT of money and most of the business market.
>>
>>I think they HAVE ...
>
> And you folks may recall that about a year ago I said Microsoft,
> Oracle, and SAP are shifting focus from the Fortune 1000 companies and
> down into the markets that we call home. I also said there were
> solutions available to deal with the onslaught, but I wasn't going to
> give those solutions away for free. Well, if competition wasn't bad
> enough before it's going to get much worse now. There are still ways
> to deal with it, but it's still going to cost ya. ;)
>
>
>>> Access is fine
>>> as a tool, but it was never designed to solely run a business
>>> intelligence
>>> or business process system. Otherwise, MS would be selling Access with
>>> some
>>> macros and calling it their "small business solution".
>>
>>The what-is-next-after-Access market is still open in my opinion.
>
> I personally believe Microsoft has made a tremendous investment into
> SQL Server 2005 in order to set the stage for a transition from MS
> Access. Access is (arguably) a capable tool for small single-user
> applications, but falls on its face in a multi-user environment. That
> said, one of my clients is successfully running a busy website with
> ASP.NET against an MS Access MDB file that's updated once per day from
> D3. However, if you look at SQL Server 2005 and the developer tools
> available it seems they are positioning it as a "real" database for
> applications vs Access for hobbyists.
>
>>I don't know what google is doing with base.google.com but I'm sure it
>>isn't pick. It seems like some combination of the web and multivalue
>>could go far. If a company like google hosted data like they do with
>>gmail, it would really catch on, given the same price tag as gmail with
>>some n gig limit before you pay.
>
> Years ago I started a project which I called MyDB which would allow
> people to create databases on the web, make them available to the
> public, get advertising for the type of data they hosted, make
> database templates available to friends or sell them for business,
> etc. None of our MV colleagues seemed to like the idea - but today
> it's called Google Base and I'm sure it will be a hit. I still have
> the code, might dig it up now that the idea is popular. Like Glen's
> open source application project these sorts of things seem to get
> dismissed by MV people but embraced by the rest of the world (Google
> for "open source business applications" and there are many nice non-MV
> offerings).
We're just too idealisitic for the times. :P
I dunno which is worse; being ahead of things and keep running into walls
or struggling to play catch-up while others are making money off of a lack
of insight.
People who can balance in the middle are the ones who only have to work
5-10 years of their life and own several vacation homes. :/ They're also
typically the ones in court fighting off IP law suits, so I guess there
isn't a "happy place".
>
>>So I think google has more chance
>>than MS of capturing the small db market. They obviously know how to
>>handle web-based huge, scalable data respositories too. They just
>>haven't played their database cards yet, I suspect.
>>
>>--dawn
>
> Dawn, the audience is completely different. While a lot of people use
> MS Access as a standalone datastore, it's also a database which can
> sit behind an application. Google Base is positioned as a stand-alone
> database - all data, no applications. I suspect at some point they
> will figure out how to allow end-users to attach business rules to
> their data and build apps around data hosted at Google Base (maybe
> with Web Services) - they'd be silly not to do this. It's at this
> point that I'd agree that Google becomes a platform for development
> rather than the series of unrelated tools as I see them now. And I'll
> predict that Microsoft will follow with their own Google Base Killer,
> a hosted database solution served from Microsoft servers through their
> new ASP initiative.
>
Oh JOY. M$ hosted solutions. If their web site doesn't get enough attacks,
their ASP servers definately will. :P We definately need a larger drain on
the Internet.
Glen
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- Re: When MV is not an option
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