Using Offline ordering when using 2 Computers

[DBurrows]

Reading through the user guide and other posts it has become apparent that in order for us to take advantage of stock control and offline ordering while still keeping our 2 PC setup (one for orders and one for site uploading) we will need to link both PCs to one "central" database.

Currently im playing with the V7 trial and have redesigned my site through a customised smart theme, as a result everything is held on my design machine in the standard actinic access database. From previous experience mysql databases seem to be the fastest type of databases to use so my proposal (providing it is easy-ish) is to convert the access database to mysql and run it on a spare PC here. The intention is to then externally link the 2 pcs to that database and hopefully all will be well.

Does anyone currently run this type of setup and could offer me any advice before the weekend in terms of does and donts, the conversion process etc.

Many many thanks in advance to all who reply!

[Jan]

How about this for a theory, if you take a copy of your Actinic database and call it data.mdb you can link Actinic to that. So you could in theory install Actinic on a different computer, change the ActinicCatalog7 ODBC connection to point to data.mdb and edit the details in there.

You could then link other Actinic to data.mdb, the only limitation would be that only certain fields can be linked in from an external database.

Regards,

[DBurrows]

What fields would not be linkable then - will i loose features of actinic because of this?

[Highlander]

I do a great deal of work with networked Access databases and I also use SQL Server and MySQL.

I would suggest that it would be much easier to stick to a common Access Database. Access can comfortably handle 200Mb but don't believe MS when they say 2Gb. If there are only two or three users you should have no problem, provided your network can handle Access traffic. It is not client server so the traffic is enormous. Once again MS will give you a ridiculous figure - which is based on the number of open connections. A single user can sometimes have many open connections. My rule of thumb is five users is ok - provided that they are not all trying to do the same thing.

For my site www.highlandclans.co.uk I have drop down lists with up to 500 tartans. I handle this by linking the Actinic database to my own super database where I have master tartan lists, supplier information etc. I simply run an update query every now and again to move stuff from my "master" tables to the linked tables in the actinic database.

One thing to be aware of and that is a bug in Windows Server 2000 and Access 2000 when it comes to record locking. If yo have all the latest patches you should be ok. Normally Access handles the record locking - but sometimes Windows decides it has to lend a hand. If it does you have a very nasty crash and a corrupt database.

MySql is improving all the time and is now pretty good. The fields are diferent from Access and it is not as straightforward as you might think. If you decide to use Access as your master - just make sure that you use field names and types that migrate to MySql. One further thing - I have found that it is dangerous to use an update query with a datefield - as Access will sometimes put it into American format (it does so wherever possible). so 10/2/04 is the 2nd October but 14/02/04 is St Valentines day.

HTH

Niall