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RE: Re: Access & Scaling John Myers; REAL nice piece on the differences(objectively stated) between Access and DB2/400. Since you do both, and (I guess) offer both types of solutions to your customers, What types of replies, or comments do you get from customers when you explain the differences between the two? What do other MS developers that you undoubtly talk to think about the differences? Do they have any idea what AS/400-DB2/400 is and are they open about the strengths/weaknesses of each platform? John Carr EdgeTech Have Classes, Will Travel ------------------------------------------- I write this as both a Microsoft Development Partner & as an IBM AS/400 Developer and Reseller. Access is written to be a "personal" DBMS. All access to Access is at the workstation level (not at the server level). In a multi-user LAN environment, all access to Access is controlled by the requesting workstation. In a LAN environment, if you run a query over a 100,000 record file, all 100,000 records will be communicated over your LAN to the workstation which is running the query. This pretty much guarantees a problem with scalability in terms of LAN utilization (at a minimum). Corrupted databases are also a significant threat because the DBMS controls are being executed on a different machine than the machine which is holding the underlying data. DB2/400 and SQL Server are both "server based" DBMS. A query is issued to the server, run on the server, and the results are returned to the client. As a result, your LAN traffic is minimized & the tendency to corrupt the database is minimized because database activity is not controlled by a client which may show you a "blue screen of death" at any time. Many of our customers where we installed Access based solutions in the past are now asking for the function to be ported to DB2/400. Their primary reasons are stability (no corrupted files), scalability (cut LAN traffic), and the fact that current AS/400 implementations of client database function have been increasingly competent. Access is good for prototyping, but DB2/400 is much better for production systems (in my book). There are a lot of folks out there who can build sexy Access based demos, but don't have a clue how to create bulletproof production systems. This is the differentiation between a "two year wonder ex-employee" and a "career piece of bedrock employee" of any organization. John Myers IBM Certified Specialist - AS/400 Technical Solutions Strategic Business Systems, Inc. 300 Lake Street, Suite B, Ramsey, NJ 07446 USA E-mail: mailto:jmyers@sbsusa.com Phone: +1 (201) EASY 400 x131 Web: http://www.sbsusa.com Fax: +1 (201) 327-6984 Instant AS/400 Web Guestbooks & Surveys - WebSurvey/400 http://www.sbsusa.com/internet/inpuzsvy.htm Prove that your shipment got there - Proof of Delivery! http://www.sbsusa.com/docmgmt/dmsol4u.htm +--- | This is the Midrange System Mailing List! | To submit a new message, send your mail to MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com. | To subscribe to this list send email to MIDRANGE-L-SUB@midrange.com. | To unsubscribe from this list send email to MIDRANGE-L-UNSUB@midrange.com. | Questions should be directed to the list owner/operator: david@midrange.com +---
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