Access (and excel) has been the bane of one of my clients existence, as many
bad reports have come out of them, and while they are not banned they are
highly discouraged and are being replaced by a central oracle data warehouse
that I built. Once a data mart is built for a purpose that an access
database was used for in the past any feeds that were used to supply data
into access is stopped, hopefully forcing people to use the warehouse.

We store data at our most granular level in the data marts and we use
business objects as a front end tool while it has numerous flaws, one of
them works to our advantage. Out of the box it does support exporting to a
text file so data has to be aggregated to some degree before it can be
extracted as excel still only support 65k rows.

We discourage access databases by not supporting their reports. While this
was a drastic measure, it was necessary as some diehards used to say that
the warehouse was wrong and their access reports were correct which made
management reluctant to use the warehouse. And after repeated validations of
the warehouse and deciphering and disproving of the access data and reports
all the diehards either quit or switched to the warehouse.

One of the first datamarts, originally built using SAS, found a reporting
issue that correct a several basis point error that had been accumulation
over the 14 year history of the company and added $6 million to the bottom
line for that year; paying for the warehouse project for that and many years
to come.


Ken Naim

-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce@(protected)]
On Behalf Of Robert Freeman
Sent: Wednesday, July 04, 2007 2:33 PM
To: oracle-l@(protected)
Subject: Oracle - MS Access - Does your company have a policy about local
vs. centralized data storage? (Perhaps a bit off topic?)

I'm trying to do a bit of research in my effort to put together a project to
move from localized to centralized data storage for Access applications and
other ODBC type things. I'm just wondering if any of you have any related
policies at your companies? Do you allow localized Access data stores or do
you centralize those data stores? I'm looking at allowing access
applications, but providing a means to easily request/create a data store
for those applications in Oracle.

Thoughts?

RF

Robert G. Freeman
Oracle Consultant/DBA/Author
Principal Engineer/Team Manager
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
Father of Five, Husband of One,
Author of various geeky computer titles
from Osborne/McGraw Hill (Oracle Press)
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