Re: Converting Access database to SQL server or Informix

On 28 Jul 1998 18:32:24 GMT, "Jon Borys" <jborys@rms.moore.com> wrote: > > >Nils Myklebust <Nils.Myklebust@nmdata.com> wrote in article ><35bca4df.15528203@news.newmedia.no>... >> While I where away an anonymous Access Developer wrote: >> >> >> Have you ever tried to run 1000 users connected to the same database >> using an MS Access front end? Did it work well? Did it give all users >> good response time? Would other solutions have given better >> responsetimes? > >I certainly never have. Have you? I don't yet have this many users, but have studied the issues involved and am designing for large number of users. > If so, could you explain by what >mechanism java is able to accomplish this non-trivial task with such >robustness? I am working on a project that has approximately 200 users and >am looking for ways to improve performance. I use MS-Access and Openlink >ODBC to connect to informix. Is JDBC that much better/faster? Why? JDBC isn't in itself better or faster than ODBC. We are talking about the full Java technology here which includes much more than JDBC. First with Java you can start at the simple level of moving part of your application from the client to a server. The first level would commonly be to move some of it to the same server as the database is running on, but you can easily use any number of servers. It's well known that reducing network traffic you can substantially increase performance. In some applications you also want servers for offloading application level processing. That's not possible with MS Access alone as a development system, although there are ways of doing some things by using remote COM/DCOM objects. At the next level you will need a transaction monitor. Those are available for Java developers. They are also available for VB developers, but a little harder to use at least for an MS Access developer. Currently you would loose most of the functionality and advantages of MS Access if you had to use a transaction monitor (assuming you can effectively at all). The two technologies aren't designed for each other. This is also to some extent true for the VB developers. There have been a strong move in the VB developer community towards data aware controls that give you some of the same advantages as MS Access. However they are neither very usefull for multi tier applications nor, and especially so, for transaction monitors. There are also intermediate solutions between full transaction monitors and simply moving objects to the server. One is to use shared connections to the database among many users. This is relatively easy in Java, and I think even available as products although I have not studied this part of the field a lot yet. It's not possible in MS Access alone, and if possible it would be hard using VB alone and probably not practical. For these development tools it may be possible to design some kind of servers that could do such things, but I doubt it would be all that usefull. The last thing I will mention here about Java that's very important to us is the ability to write multi threaded applications in a relatively simple way. One thing we use this for is to immediately display information to the user that we know is easily available from the database. Then we let the user continue to work, while more data is gathered to be displayed as it becomes available. We are in the process of developing this functionality now, but know that it will become very usefull in day to day operations. Another usefull use of multi threading to us is in an advanced job control application we are developing for executing batch processes. In our case we need to do that on multiple servers, and it would be substantially harder to do with any tool but Java. All in all Java is an integreated technology with most of the features available to develop advanced applications of all sorts. With the newest tools development is also quite easy and fast. It's hard to beat now, and will become more so as the fledgeling tools bussiness is developing more advanced, better and simpler tools. >Thanks in advance for the info! Nils Myklebust NM Data AS Norway E-mail: Nils.Myklebust@nmdata.com FAQ at: http://www.iiug.org/techinfo/faq/faq_top.html (Now with ODBC info under "Third party products".)