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MS Excel

rjh01 said:
There is no one good solution. If the database will be updated by one person and has only two or three tables then Microsoft Access is great. If it starts getting bigger than that then you need to start looking at other databases. Only problem with these is that they cost $. They also need an outside team to do the background work (backups, updates to software, training).
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MySQL is free and scales well up to a fair size.
 
Gawdzilla Sama said:
Convert the entries in 1-2-3 to Excel "back in the day". A three-letter "Bureau" based in D.C. wanted to migrate. "How long to coI jnvert?" "One hour." "We have 800+ entries!" "Okay, one hour and two minutes." I could hear the "yeah, sure" in thy reply to that. I delivered.

"What the ◊◊◊◊?"

"I just put an ## at the beginning of each entry and exported the data to a text file. Each field after that started with one #."

"We were told it would take a few weeks and the price quoted was scary!"

"Those guys must think nobody pays for those kind of deals. But why the '2 minutes?

"Coffee break."
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In my COBOL coding class I figured out a way to save a lot of keystrokes. I changed my input for say, the word MOVE to a special character that was never or rarely used. (One keystroke instead of four.) At the end I did a simple Find/Replace, then proofread for any unexpected results. I remember my teacher looking at my input when I was still working on it, saying "What the hell is all that?"
 
Most of my advanced experience with Excel was learning how to write VB functions that did some fairly basic stuff Excel did not have in its extensive panoply of features.
 
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novaphile said:
You're expecting a list of databases?

Oracle, MSSQL Server, DB2, Postgres, Ingress, MYSQL.
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No. I asked you specifically what your organization actually uses instead of Access, since you claimed that it has outlawed it.
 
JayUtah said:
You might also try MariaDB, which is free-er (Oracle now owns MySQL) and written by the original MySQL developers.
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There's also Postgres (also known as PostgreSQL), and for smaller stuff SQLite is nice and very fast. Both are free/libre open source software, so you won't get caught by outrageous licensing fees or sudden "withdrawal from marketing."
 
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jt512 said:
No. I asked you specifically what your organization actually uses instead of Access, since you claimed that it has outlawed it.
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All of the above, except for Ingress.

I mainly worked with MSSQL server.

Note the past tense. Been retired for three years now.

From memory: Oracle for the Data Warehouse, MSSQL for the main application I supported, and many smaller applications, oh yes, Adabas for some of the mainframe applications, and DB2 for others, MySQL as the back end for Confluence and JIRA running on Ubuntu (not entirely sure about that, I didn't do any back end work for those).
 
wobs said:
Compare this with creating a database - I wouldn't know where to start, and I once went on a one day Access course. I just don't have the time to sit down and learn from scratch how to build one, and I'm currently looking at buying one for our site as our old Access database is struggling. The alternative is finding someone to make one from scratch, but I'm not sure our large company would go with that.
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I created my own database in Postgres and wrote a frontend in Gtkada to deal with my business accounts, viz. sales orders, purchase orders and stock control. True, it did take a fair bit of time to get to grips with, but the documentation available was pretty good and anything I got really stuck with, managed to find an answer eventually from some nice helpful people online.

It's not Sage, but it does for my simple wants.

Spreadsheets I still use occasionally, but only for double-checking long columns of figures.
 
alfaniner said:
In my COBOL coding class I figured out a way to save a lot of keystrokes. I changed my input for say, the word MOVE to a special character that was never or rarely used. (One keystroke instead of four.) At the end I did a simple Find/Replace, then proofread for any unexpected results. I remember my teacher looking at my input when I was still working on it, saying "What the hell is all that?"
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The teachers at my COBOL classes at Purdue were all Naval Reservists who spent their "two weeks" helping COBOL programmers at the five-sided puzzle box. You could tell when they'd done their "two" because of the glazed expression on their face when they returned to the real world.
 
wobs said:
Compare this with creating a database - I wouldn't know where to start, and I once went on a one day Access course. I just don't have the time to sit down and learn from scratch how to build one, and I'm currently looking at buying one for our site as our old Access database is struggling. The alternative is finding someone to make one from scratch, but I'm not sure our large company would go with that.
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There are a few free tools that can help. One method if you're happy with excel is simply to use an import wizard in a DBMS like MySql and it will work out the column names etc for you as it imports a CSV. DBeaver will do a lot of lifting. It depends where you're coming from.
 
Wudang said:
That's a very vague question. There are a myriad of free tools like Dbeaver maybe?
Eta : replying to rjh01
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Nothing vague about my question. What you are saying is that MySQL is not a stand alone product. Since there are heaps of tools it would be hard to find people who are experienced in any of them. Or to find a job that uses the specific tools that a person has. The danger is that you would need to employ someone to look after the back end at a huge cost.
 
rjh01 said:
Nothing vague about my question. What you are saying is that MySQL is not a stand alone product. Since there are heaps of tools it would be hard to find people who are experienced in any of them. Or to find a job that uses the specific tools that a person has. The danger is that you would need to employ someone to look after the back end at a huge cost.
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It's not exactly rocket science.
 
jt512 said:
For example, what specifically?
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MySQL, for example, specifically. It's free, it scales, and it's common enough that you can easily find a DBA to handle backups and upgrades.

If you're a big operation, and this is a business critical process, you might consider Amazon Aurora RDS. It's highly optimized, SQL compatible (so your same DBA can simply up his game; no need to hire a new specialist), and comes with lots of resiliency features. It costs, but you get what you pay for, and this is a business critical process after all.

If you need an Oracle database, you'll know it already.

Then there's a number of niche and variant relational database solutions, that may or may not be more optimal for specific use cases. Consult your in-house DBAs and backend developers to see if something like MongoDB makes more sense for your use case. Or don't consult - they'll tell you what they need.
 
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