Hello,
I am upsizing an ACCESS 2007 db to SQL LITE. What I need is for my access F/E's to be able to work offline and then connect later to the sql B/E to sync through a remote VPN. Is this possible?
Hello,
I am upsizing an ACCESS 2007 db to SQL LITE. What I need is for my access F/E's to be able to work offline and then connect later to the sql B/E to sync through a remote VPN. Is this possible?
'possible' - anything is possible. I don't mean to be snarky. Fundamentally Access is designed so that FE forms write directly to BE tables. Emphasis on the word 'directly'.
a 'connect later' situation implies that somehow all the data was stored locally in the interim. Thus you are really talking about using a central db (sqllite) to act as a master remote consolidation/replication back end to multiple stand alone satellite dbs.
This is not Access. But this is data warehousing, in the generic sense. It is widely done by database specialists. People write their masters thesis on these type topics and get careers inside the big development companies for projects of this type.
In terms of Access; Right now, one of the roles of Sharepoint is to do just this. Act as a remote central tables receptacle. Users of Access at outlying satellite points can option to 'work locally' and then they resync to Sharepoint which replicates the data. Rather that reinvent that wheel for Access via sqllite, one would probably be better off exploring this possiblity.
Hope this helps a little in terms of perspective.
Thanks for the reply. Ye I tried the sharepoint route but it just will not handle our situation. Our F/E's are offshore on ships that have limited bandwidth and sharepoint acts like a greedy bandwidth hog. Most of the time it just times out on sync. Ah well I was hopeing for a solution that i could utilize the little inventory program I created on ACCESS. Thanks for your help.
We use citrix or VPN to allow users to connect remotely to the network when offsite. This works very well. Otherwise, besides sharepoint (which I'm not that familiar with), another option is MSAccess Replication (which I'd highly NOT recommend at all!) Another option is to clone your form designs and then use local MSAccess tables for your offsite users and then design an export/import routine to export/import the data from one mdb to the other (which would involve several queries to update/find dups/append/etc...) Not the ideal route but it is workable. You'd have to be careful about updating records though since some users could edit the same records. Tricky to do with the import/export routines but again, workable.
Ideally though, if at all possible, I'd highly consider using VPN or Citrix. I've always had great luck with both and it's ideal with a SQL Server backend.