Some of you may already know that Microsoft backtracked on their planned deprecation of OLEDB and provided a new OLEDB driver. However, it can be a headscratcher to figure what you should be using. When we were using SQL Server Native Client, it was pretty easy -- the Native Client had both OLEDB an [...]
On occasions when building a project involving an Access front-end and a SQL Server backend, we've run into this question. Should we use a trigger for something? Designing a SQL Server trigger for Access application may be a solution but only after careful considerations. Sometime this gets suggeste [...]
As many of you already know, SQL Server team has announced deprecation of OLEDB for SQL Server database engine (Read: we can't use ADO because ADO uses OLEDB). Additionally, SQL Azure does not officially support ADO, though one still can get away with it using SQL Server Native Client. However, the [...]
Typically, when we do reporting, we usually do it at a higher granularity. For example, clients commonly wants a monthly report of sales. The database would store the individual sales as a single record, so it's no problem summing up the figures to the month each. Ditto with year, or even going from [...]
Occasionally we come across project requirements that include the ability to do sequential numbering in Access on a set of data. We cannot just use the auto-number data type because there is no promise of sequentiality but only uniqueness. In other words, if someone creates a record then later delet [...]
We recently had a project that required us to interact with console tools. People might have different terms for those type of tools so when I speak of console tools, I'm referring to a program or script that opens a command prompt and output stuff to that prompt and maybe accept user input by typin [...]
MS Access has a very powerful support for using expressions in your forms/reports’ controls. For example, showing a sum of some column can be as simple as putting down: [crayon-5cbfc6d726314226098240/] and we’re done! Now, sometimes, we don’t have simple requirements. We might need to calculate a pe [...]
On May 13th, at 6:30 PM CST, I will be speaking about how you can easily create a solution that enable you to have your Access program working across broad geographic regions by leveraging SQL Azure Data Sync which is still in preview. In the talk, we will demonstrate how to get set up with replicat [...]
A lot of times, I write a stored procedure to do several things. More often than not, I might be doing mass inserts, updates or deletions. Now, I'm not your average suspenders-and-belt guy. No, I go one step further and insist on wearing an overall over my suspenders and my belt, thank you very much [...]
This is part two of our two-part series on working with XML data with a SQL Server backend. Part one can be found here. In part one, we showed how much simpler and effective it was to manipulate XML data by doing it directly in the SQL Server layer as opposed to front-end or middle-layer code. The i [...]
This is part one of a two-part series that discusses working with XML data with an SQL Server backend. Part two is discussed here. I've personally found XML files to be something of a bugbear. They're going to require some kind of transformation to get it in a format that's useful for importing or e [...]
