Excel as the Backend to a Website? - excel

A third party developer my boss has brought in, designed a "Better" System than our ASP.NET + MSSQL Server 2005 website we're using now.
Here are the relevant specs:
Excel + ODBC as the data store
Built using old school ASP, not ASP.NET
Is there any glaring problem with his solution short of the ancient tech? Thread safety etc?
Let me put it this way, "What can tell my boss (who's only partially technical) to blow this code out of the water?"
Thank you,
Vindictive Developer :)

Excel should never be used as a data store,
It is not a database
It will not handle multiple users at once at all
No support for transactions, so if an error occurs in the middle of a odbc call the excel file could end up trashed. (Even access would be better then using excel and that isn't saying much)
Excel is a spreadsheet, designed for analyzing data, not for storing data.

Straight from Microsoft: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/195951
IMPORTANT: Though ASP/ADO applications support multi-user access, an Excel spreadsheet does not. Therefore, this method of querying and updating information does not support multi-user concurrent access.

Allain, as well as the great technical reasons that have come out here, I think you need to ask yourself "why did the boss do this?"
Perception is reality, and if your boss is only partially technical, then purely technical reasoning may not get through.
Apart from the glaring architectural weaknesses, is there some functionality in this monster that makes it more appealing to your boss? Generally people don't do stupid things on purpose, it may serve you well to consider where you boss is coming from before you go making a CLM.

Ummm.... it lacks scalability: You could only have a few users. Is the data important?

Here's what you can tell him: Remind him of the nightmares that happen when two or more people need to edit the same spreadsheet at the same time. Now tell him to imagine that multiplied by a hundred people who can't call each other to tell them to "close the spreadsheet so I can update it". That's what it will be like.

Synching issues dealing with a seperate xls datastore and sql server 2005? On our IIS server, classic asp pages are prohibited by default. Maybe that's a sign lol.

How about terrible performance, since Excel is not designed to be used as a database? Tell your boss Excel isn't even a single-user database (that's what MS Access is), let alone a multi-user database designed for high, concurrent performance.
And of course by using pure ASP you're losing access to all of the libraries .NET framework (which of course is what all library developers in the MS ecosystem are focusing on). But you asked for 1 reason, and the first is better.

I would go with the mantra that those are the wrong tools for the job (assuming they are in your case). It'd be like using a screw driver as a hammer. For one nail, it might work with a lot of sweat and tears. For a real project, through, this is likely doomed.
I'd boast about the tools you are familiar with--how much better the tooling is in terms of performance, security, maintenance (esp. maintenance cost).
You could say something like he's paying someone to write a new app with decade old technology which may not be supported for much longer (if it still is...).

Ummm...row limit?

Is an Excel spreadsheet even going to handle concurrent transactions correctly? It wasn't designed for this kind of thing, and I wouldn't hold it responsible if it did something bad (like only letting one ODBC connection in at a time, or not properly locking concurrent updates).

That excel file's going to get corrupted in a hurry with many people hitting it at the same time. The scalability of Excel as a backend datastore is almost non-existent. It has a hard enough time keeping data integrity with its native Shared Workbook feature...
BTW- Is this third party a relative of your boss??? Yikes...

The ancient tech is itself a glaring problem. Will you be around forever? It will be very difficult for the boss to find new developers to maintain something like this. The tech world has moved on.

Related

Development Platform for Small application

I will soon be developing an application to log and priorities worker shifts. It only needs to be small, and simple, but I am wondering what framework to use. All that needs to happen is boxes with names are in 3 lists, and the user can switch these around at will. It must log the times, which I will need access to in real time.
Im new to application development of this sort, and would like any suggestions. I have time to learn new technologies / languages.
Portability / device independence would also be useful. Should I consider a Web Application in Javascript? or something more like Python.
Thanks.
Even if your application is going to be simple that does not mean that whole system will be simple too. I can imagine that your app will serve only as a front end to something much bigger. If that is a case and you really have freedom to choose what language you will develop your app with consider choosing something that you will feel comfortable to work with. But before you will make your decision I would go to whoever gave you that task and try to get as much information about it as you can because expected features can help in choosing technology.
First of all, it seems that it is up to you to decide if it should be web or desktop app. In my opinion it is completely wrong situation. You should get clear requirements on what kind of application customer expects and in what environment it should work. And I would not move a finger towards a code before somebody gave me that information. You write that portability and device independence would be useful but is it actual requirement or you just think it would be nice feature to deliver?
EDITED (to answer a question in comment)
Probably there is as much possible solutions as people that would answer you so in the end you will have to make your own choices.
One way of doing it (considering that you want to learn something new and have a challenge :) would be implement WCF service that would act as a data provider from your database (so every GetUsers(), GetVacationDays() methods would be in it) and it would take care of some business logic (for example CalculateMaxValidWorkingTime() or whatever). That service would be a real power horse of your system. Since you don't have clear requirement whether it should be desktop or web app you could satisfy both possibilities by creating thin clients that would communicate with your service and they would be just a pretty front ends. And if you keep in mind that you can consume webservices practically with everything from C++ to .NET (C#/VB) to Javascript to Python to PHP after you done with service you would not be constrained with one particular technology/language.
Regarding databases I won't advice because personally I hate dealing with them and it always was somebody else's task to provide me with pretty API :)

Replacement or Migration strategy for Excel/Access

Is there a way of offering the flexibility of Excel/Access development that end users love while instilling centralised IT management so data and logic is secure, backed up, version controlled etc. The common options are to re-write in C#/ASP.Net/Java/Python/Your Choice, but that takes away control from the users. Is there a better way, and what do you do at your site?
There is a universal issue of users creating fantastically useful Excel/Access mini-apps that the IT department would like to bring under control. Users love the flexibility that Excel affords, especially on the fly changes, graphing and data import/export. In Access we have brilliant QBE. The downside is that after a short while there are legions of out of control spreadsheets/mdbs which are mission critical, with lots poorly understood business logic, and brittle code, they're a pain to support especially as staff move on.
This puts the IT dept in an awkward spot, they'd like to support these apps, but don't know enough about them. This is made more difficult as they are typically insecure with zero documentation.
Having been of both sides of the fence I would go after the root cause of the problem. Why do uses make their own little apps? Because it is too hard/expensive/time consuming/never turns out right when they go through the “proper” channels.
The other thing is they tend to know the business very well so whilst their coding might not be very good their knowledge of what needs doing is very good.
So what can we do to combat this problem? I personally think their should be a small team of people within IT whose job (or one of their jobs) is to develop these small applications. They should work very closely with the end users and not be locked in the ivory tower of IT.
In my current role I’m on the non-IT side of the fence, I have a few quite major applications that needed to be developed so I asked for an install of visual studio and some space on an SQL server. I had my request denied. So I just asked for SQL server space, again request denied (each request taking about a week to go through) So in the end I’m “stuck” in access.
Now these are very nice access apps with version control, comments in the (shock!) and all the other nice things but at the end of the day I was trying to do things the “right” way and ended up being forced down the access route. So when my apps try to get scaled up and I’m quoting a long time for a rewrite who is to blame?
Have you considered looking at SharePoint for department-level applications? Many professional developers will balk at the idea of using Sharepoint for "application development," but it truthfully can be a great way for "power users" to start putting their data and tools in a managed framework.
With SharePoint, you can manage the overall structure of the site and then set up users with elevated permissions within their respective departments. There are some great 3rd-party tools to help with keeping an eye on what's going on in your SharePoint site.
SharePoint is not a silver bullet by any means, but it is great for many multi-user applicatinos that need to keep up with a list of data.
(The following is not really related to my above answer, but your question really hit home and I thought I'd share my similar experiences and insights.)
Our company will be going through a similar process in the near future. I'm on the "end user" side of things and can sympathize with a lot of what Kevin Ross said. Sometimes Access and Excel are simply the best tools available for me to get the job done.
Here's an example: I was asked several years ago to come up with a system for creating Purchase Orders to a vendor in China for product for which there is a 3 month lead time. Our ERP software had a few features for procurement, but nothing that even came close to the complexity of the situation we were facing. Years later, after going through several iterations of the application in Excel (VLOOKUP was a lifesaver), Access ("So that is why people using relational databases. Awesome!), and back in Excel ("let's not make this so complicated"), I still find that these Micorosft Office apps are the best tools to get the job done.
What's the cost to not use these tools to get the job done?
Contract work to our ERP vendor to add a special feature for this ordering process: are you kidding me? We'd likely pay tens of thousands of dollars for an unflexible monolithic application with horrendous user experience...and we would still end up back in Excel.
Buy third party software designed for this exact process: I've seen an on-site demo of software that does exactly what I want for our procurement process. It starts at $100,000. There are probably other tools that we can get for a few thousand dollars, but at that price point, I've already emulated most of their features in my own application.
Try to finish the job "by hand." : Ha! I'm a programmer at heart, which means I'm lazy. If it takes a solid week of sitting at a desk to work up a purchase order (it actually did take this long), you can bet I'm going to work up a solution so that it only takes me a few hours (and now it does). Perhaps the guy after me will go back to doing most of it by hand, but I'll use the tools in my toolbox to save myself time and stress.
It's so hard to find the perfect application to allow for maximum creativity on the user end but still allow IT to "manage" it. Once you think you've found a solution for one thing, you realize it doesn't do something else. Can I write I printable report in this solution like I used to do in Access? Can I write complicated Excel formulas that tie multiple data sources together from different sheets ("You want me to learn what? No, I've never heard of a "SQuirreL query" before. VLOOKUP is just fine thankyouvermuch)? Can I e-mail the results to the people in my department? Can it automatically pull data from our back-end database like I do in Excel and Access? Can I write my own code, VBA or otherwise, to make my job easier? The list goes on.
In the end, the best advice I can give to any IT manager in your situation is to respect the other workers at your company. Let them know their work is important (even if it's only useful to them and the guy at the next desk over). Let them know you are not trying to make their job harder. Don't assume they are morons for creating mission-critical applications in office productivity software; they are just trying to get the job done with the tools at hand and are usually quite capable and intelligent people. Invite them to explore different solutions with you instead of just removing the tools they currently have in their toolbox and then replacing them with ones they don't know how to use.
At the end of the day, if you have users who are smart enough to shoot themselves in the foot by creating complicated apps in Excel and Access, they are probably smart enough to learn to use the appropriate tools to accomplish the same tasks. Invest the time and energy to involve them in the process and you will have a solution that works for everyone at the end.
You could try a hybrid approach: Allow your users to use Excel/Access to home-brew their own, specialized tools, but take the mission-critical stuff and put it under IT control. There are a few strategies that could help you with this:
Make sure that your IT department is firm on VBA. Not the "yeah-everybody-can-write-a-few-lines-of-basic" type of knowledge, but in-depth training, just like you would if it were a less simple programming language. Although "real programmers" will tell you otherwise, it is possible to write large, stable applications in VBA.
If you currently have the data in Access databases, move away from that and migrate it to an SQL Server. This allows you to do centralized backup and management, while still giving your power users the flexibility to "link" these SQL Server tables to their Access frontend.
Commonly used business logic should be under control of your IT department. This can be done either with VBA, by creating an Access library that is linked by your users, or in any of the .net languages, using COM interop. The latter sounds more complicated than it is, and it will increase the satisfaction of your IT department, since developing in .net is just much more rewarding than VBA (version control possible, etc.).
I would second one of Kevin Ross's main points:
I personally think their should be a
small team of people within IT whose
job (or one of their jobs) is to
develop these small applications. They
should work very closely with the end
users and not be locked in the ivory
tower of IT.
I think any IT department that has a lot of users using Access/Excel should have at least one properly trained and experienced specialist in developing apps on those platforms. That person would be the go-between to make sure that:
IT's priorities and policies get properly implemented in the home-grown apps.
the end users get expert help in converting their home-grown efforts into something more stable and well-designed.
I would second Tony's point that whoever works with the end users in revising these apps to meet IT standards should work side-by-side with the users. The Access/Excel specialist should be an advocate for the end users, but also for the IT policies that have to be followed.
I also think that an IT department could have a specialist or two on staff, but should also have a full-time professional Access and/or Excel developer as a consultant, since the on-staff people could probably handle day-to-day issues and management of the apps, while the professional consultant could be called in for planning and architecture and for the implementation of more complex feature sets.
But all of that would depend on the size of the organization and the number of apps involved. I don't know that it would be desirable to have someone on salary who is nothing but an Access/Excel specialist, precisely because of the problem you get with all salaried employees compared to consultants -- the employees don't see as wide a variety of situations as an active consultant with the same specialization is likely to see and thus the consultant is going to have broader experience.
Of course, I recognize that many companies do not like to outsource anything, or not something that important. I think that's unwise, but then again, I'm the person that gets hired by the people who decide to do it!
If it's mission critical, and it's in Access or Excel, is built poorly, and no one understands it, it is probably time to rebuild it properly.
When the 'users' are in control it usual means one particular person is in control of the architecture, design, coding and documentation... except they normally omit the documentation step. Source control and bug reporting, the touchstone of software development, is usually absent. Few instances of code reuse, due to the nature of Office apps (code modules usually embedded into documents) and VBA (little OOP, most VBA coders don't use Implements, etc). All this means that the resulting applications are not subject to get proper scrutiny and quality can suffer, meaning there are likely to be maintenace issues, escpecially when that one user leaves. I know because I used to be that person ;)
So in order to satisfy the IT department, the proper process needs to be applied. That one 'power' user can continue to own the design and coding but will get peer review, perhaps the serivces of a technical author and a dedicated tester, be required to use source control, perhaps consider integrating with enterprise systems, etc.
There is no getting around the use of Excel/Access. It's what's available, and still very powerful and flexible. The best thing to do is offer some guidelines as to how files should look and be set up. If everyone is using similar standards then the files will live longer and more productive lives, beyond the creator's tenure at the company.
You've got some excellent answers regarding dealing with the folks and the business side of things. So my response will be more technical.
If you are going to redesign the app have the developers work in the same offices as the users. Given the users updates every day or two. If the users have any minor suggestions give those to the users within a day or two. Ultra Frequent Application Deployment
Give the power users an Access MDB/ACCDB linked to the tables with a bunch of starter queries. Let them create the queries they need to export the data to Excel for their own purposes and distribution to clients.

Domain repository for requirements management - build or buy?

In my organisation, we have some very inefficient processes around managing requirements, tracking what was actually delivered on what versions, etc, do subsequent releases break previous functionality, etc - its currently all managed manually. The requirements are spread over several documents and issue trackers, and the implementation details is in code in subversion, Jira, TestLink. I'm trying to put together a system that consolidates the requirements info, so that it is sourced from a single, authoritative source, is accessible via standard interfaces - web services, browsers, etc, and can be automatically validated against. The actual domain knowledge is not that complicated but is highly proprietary and non-standard (i.e., not just customers with addresses, emails, etc), and is relational: customers have certain functionalities, features switched on/off, specific datasources hooked up - all on specific versions. So modelling this should be straightforward.
Can anyone advise the best approach for this - I a certain that I can develop a system from scratch that matches exactly the requirements, in say ruby on rails, grails, or some RAD framework. But I'm having difficulty getting management buy-in, they would feel safer with an off the shelf solution.
Can anyone recommend such a system? Or am I better off building it from scratch, as I feel I am? I'm afraid a bought system would take just as long to deploy, and would not meet our requirements.
Thanks for any advice.
I believe that you are describing two different problems. The first is getting everyone to standardize and the second is selecting a good tool for requirements management. I wouldn't worry so much about the tool as I would the process and the people. Having the best tool in the world won't help if your various project managers don't want to share.
So, my suggestion is to start simple. Grab Redmine or Trac and take on the challenge of getting everyone to standardize. Once you have everyone in the right mindset then you can improve the tools you use for storage.
{disclaimer - mentioning my employer's product}
The brief experiments I made with a commercial tool RequisitePro seemed pretty good me. Allowed one to annotate existing Word docs and create a real-time linked database of the identified requisistes then perform lots of analysis and tracking of them.
Sometimes when I see a commercial product I think "Oh, well nice glossy bits but the fundamentals I could knock up in Perl in a weekend." That's not the case with this stuff. I would certainly look at commercial products in this space and exeperiment with a couple (ReqPro has a free trial, I guess the competition will too) before spending time on my own development.
Thanks a mill for the reply. I will take a look at RequisitePro, at least I'll be following the "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" strategy ;) youre right, and I kinda knew it, in these situations, buy is better. It is tempting when I can visualise throwing it together quickly, but theres other tradeoffs and risks with that approach.
Thanks,
Justin
While Requisite Pro enforces a standard and that can certainly help you in your task, I'd certainly second Mark on trying to standardize the input by agreement with personnel and using a more flexible tool like Trac, Redmine (which both have incredibly fast deploy and setup times, especially if you host them from a VM) or even a custom one if you can get the management to endorse your project.

is there any replacement of Access? [closed]

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I am a programmer, and my father uses Access to collect the patients information (my father is a doctor),
He wants me to teach him how to use it.
I don't like Access (I'm a linux guy), and I cannot find any replacement of it. Do you guys know of any? (it must be easy enough for my father to use)
Maybe you need to be a bit more pragmatic about this.
I'm not a fan of Access either, but if your father already understands it and he already has the system in place, you need to ask the question, why change? If it aint broke don't try to fix it.
You may find that a few simple changes in the existing system gives your father everything he needs, it'll save you a whole lot of time and means you don't need to retrain your father.
What about OpenOffice - Base?
Your father wants you to teach him how to use access but you're a linux guy and don't like access.
Access isn't the problem here
I don't think you and your father a good fit for this.
Get someone else to teach him how to use Access
Access is not always the monster it is made out to be. A poorly coded database in any application or language is a poorly coded database. Access' dominance of the market at a critical time led to more people coming across a higher ratio of poorly designed databases.
There's a great deal of support out there for Access users and programmers too. I particularly like Access World Forums. As ilivewithian said, if you're not happy telling him about it, get someone else to.
If however you are keen to take on the role of tutor to your dad (and I can see the attraction - a chance to give something back, perhaps), then I would suggest a web-based database interface. Unlike Oli, I have no experience of Django, but I would recommend Dabble or blist. (Blist is particularly good at handling images, Dabble is better at flexible report formats, though neither is as good at reports as Access, IMHO).
I think the natural successor to Access is a simple web-interface database system.
They're simple enough to create in a billion different ways but I would seriously suggest trying Django (because you'll find its admin area does 90% of the real work for you in this case)
FileMaker Inc. is subsidiary of Apple. It runs on Mac OS X as well as Windows (whereas MS Access only runs on Windows). Many people claim FileMaker is easier to use than MS Access. Sounds like FileMaker might be the perfect solution for you! (although I do agree with ilivewithian)
There's also Sun's counterpart to MS Access in OpenOffice/StarOffice called BASE (someone already mentioned this), which is also cross-platform compatible.
Rather than develop his own record keeping application he would probably be better off purchasing an already developed system from one of the numerous medical record system vendors. He'll get a better application and have people he can call on for support. Plus there are all of the legal issues about medical record storage and access. A vendor will have worked out those problems already.
That having been said there are many other file based databased systems out there: http://www.google.com/search?q=file+based+database
I haven't used any of them so I can't make a recommendation.
Of course, there's always the various enterprise databases (Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, etc...) as well. Of those SQL Server is probably the easiest to learn for a newbie. Since there's no 64 bit version of Access I'm starting to see people replace Access with SQL Server Express (free!) for small applications that need to run on 64 bit windows.
I am using Viravis now for more than 6 months in a multi-language organization with several projects and I find it very good. It's not only easy to build (I am a beginner) but they give also very good support!
Gambas ist a very good alternative for Access if one used Access as a database frontend and programmed with VBA (Visual Basic fro Applications). One can reuse a lot of code written for Access and create forms and reports easily.
So for a VB or VBA programmer, who wants to use the own knowledge under Linux, Gambas is a wonderful solution.
No first hand experience, but you can try out OpenOffic.org Database. Or, you may teach your Dad to use the MySQL GUI tool.
Getting the database structure is the toughest part for most. Creating a simple form or report is not that tough either. As far as being a users (data entry, reports, etc.) is probably easier than most applications. You also have all the searching and sorting capabilities; why reinvent the wheel?
Viravis may be an online alternative to the access database. You should better to check it out if it fit your need.
For Windows and simple data, I would use Excel, so I think Open Office should be ok. Unless your father has a hospital, it will probably fit... Or you can do some programming, take embedded database like Firebird and write something on your own, say - in Java?

Upgrading and Security Implementation (Access 2000-2003 and up)

I’ve been working on a few small scale Access projects that have turned large scale rather quickly. The original designer implemented next to zero security and everyone can just walk in with a simple shift enter, way beyond just a security hole for nuclear submarines to dive through and that has always drove me bonkers.
With that said, users are currently on Office 2000, migrating slowly into 2003. I have taken this opportunity to convince higher parties to implement said security through the use of built in access tools.
Next I get to go through hundreds of functions and forms to pop in option explicit to define all the data types restricting the compile to MDE and clean up memory that was not done for some reason. There are some sensitive connection strings in the code that are plain as day that need to be compiled to reduce the risk factor.
My questions involve both the upgrade to 2003+ and the built in security. And yes, this is what I'm stuck with using unless I really want to redo everything in Visual FoxPro but building a porsche with rocks... not my idea of a good time.
When moving into office 2007, are
there any major holes that I should
be working around ahead of time?
Within the next year and a half the
whole business is supposedly
upgrading to this and I’ve only heard
horror stories about changed/obsolete
functions
Are there any major bugs that
can/will happen because of the use of
the workgroup file and permissions?
Tricks I should know ahead of time if
something crazy happens to lock
everyone out of it?
In the sandbox, I have not implemented the Encryption feature. Pros/Cons, Risks?
Any other good tips? I realize the broadness of this question and have a few good books on hand here (Professional Access 2000 Programming, Access Developers 2002, Developing Solutions with Office 2000 Components and VBA) but obviously these are before the time of current Access and Jet technology. If anything, a good book recommendation would be a booster for me, anything to give me a head start. Right now I really need to devour this security issue, its beyond just out of hand considering the sensitivity of the information at hand.
Thanks for reading my dreaded wall of text o.O
User level security does not exist for Access 2007 files (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/access/HA101662271033.aspx). If the data is very sensitive, you may wish to consider a different back-end.
If the data is truly that sensitive it shouldn't be stored in an Access database file. Anyone can copy the entire data MDB/ACCDB and take it home with them to analyze at their leisure. Instead the data should be upsized to a database engine such as SQL Server.
Keep the current Access queries, forms and reports but get the data into a format that isn't so easy to steal.
Then think about limiting their views, logging the queries they run and such.
I would wait until A2010 is out before making any determination about upgrades beyond A2003. A2003 is fine for now, seems to me. I certainly wouldn't want to wade into targetting development to A2007 with A2010 coming out so soon and having so many really great new features (table-level data macros, really useful additions to Sharepoint integration that make a lot of really huge things possible, to name just two). My plan is to skip A2007 with clients (though I have it installed now and am playing with it so that I'll be better prepared when 2010 comes out).
One thing that doesn't often get mentioned about A2007 is that the Office FileSearch object was removed in Office 2007. If your app uses it, you can use my File Search class module to replace it. I've had it in production use since June (when I created it), but just released it more widely and am currently troubleshooting some issues that seem to be related to file names with odd characters.

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