| Since the mid-eighties I have been producing
databases for large corporates, in either a permanent or a contract role. Before the Windows revolution, dBASE was the
most popular platform for producing relational databases and I
wrote a car park monitoring system, a helpdesk call tracker
(both for BAe), and a PC asset and software database (for
Comet). Also written for Comet (and still in use today) was a
system responsible for printing cheques for values up to
£10m. |
| Windows v3.0 and Microsoft Access v1 brought
databases to the masses, way back in 1990. Nowadays I use both
Access 97 and 2000 to create back-end databases and complete
applications for myself and for clients. A back-end database
is just the data without a friendly interface; the displaying
of the records is done by another application, such as a web
page or Visual Basic application. |
| A database consists of one or more
"tables", some related and others independent. The
way that these tables are designed and connected is of
paramount importance to the speed, reliability and future
expandability of the whole database. There are three basic
rules of good database design, called the "normalisation"
of data. Breaking any of these rules will result in a database
that will eventually need to be re-designed. |
| In recent years I have been writing front-ends
(i.e. interfaces) using VB 6.0, into an Access database. One
such project was to write an upgrade to an existing commercial
application that produced tabular and graphical reports from
data collected from roadside vehicle
sensors (see article dated 15th Oct 2001). Efficient
database design and indexing was absolutely essential because of the
enormous number of records in each table. |
| Cyclone Rollout
versions 1 and 2 were written using Access 2000 as both a
front-end and back-end. Version 3 (still in development) uses
VB 6.0 as the front-end (to an Access d/b). |
| Another recent project involved using a
database to write HTML (i.e. web pages) directly from a table
of company announcements on a local PC, to the web server that
would display them. This solution was preferable to using a
remote database because of security considerations, and the
small number of records involved. |
| I have also used ASP (the language behind
complex web pages) to read and write databases and dynamically
produce reports online. |
| I can thoroughly recommend the following books: |
- Professional VB6 Databases (ISBN 1-861002-02-5)
- Microsoft Access Bible (ISBN 0-7645-3286-3)
- Access 2000 Developer's Handbook (ISBN 0-821-2370-9)
|
| [home] |