[Techtalk] MS Access --> mysql

[Conor Daly]

On Fri, May 02, 2003 at 02:32:18PM -0400 or so it is rumoured hereabouts, 
Charlotte Oliver thought:
> 
> Agreed with this - I've done a similiar thing and it took me many weeks
> of work, though a large part of that is because of the idiotic way I had
> to set up the database to make it autonumber.  (It was an inventory
> system and we have something where numbers in the 1000s are desktops,
> 2000s are monitors, 3000s are printers, etc., etc., so I had to have
> separate tables for each one, which got very tedious).

Someone once said to me: "Never try to embed meaning into an ID number"
What will you do when you have 1001 desktops? 1001 monitors?  Embedded
meanings will always catch you out...
 
> In hindsight, I should have written my scripts to do the autonumbering
> for me, rather than the database.

Our 30Gb database is set up _solely_ as a data repository.  Any work on
the data is done by external programs that:

1. request data from the DB
2. modify the data
3. submit the modified data to the DB

When we move from Ingres to MySQL, we won't have to recreate the
application within MySQL.  We'll simply[0] have to translate the embedded
sql calls in a few[1] programs...

Conor

[0] for arbitrary values of "simply"
[1] for arbitrary values of "few"

-- 
Conor Daly <conor.daly at oceanfree.net>

Domestic Sysadmin :-)
---------------------
Faenor.cod.ie
 11:40am  up 43 days, 17:16,  0 users,  load average: 0.08, 0.02, 0.01
Hobbiton.cod.ie
 11:39am  up 43 days, 17:14,  2 users,  load average: 0.05, 0.04, 0.00