Opening DB from remote origin (accdb)

[ZeeBoer]

Hello dear NeoBook community,

Sorry for the spam - but I thought i better open two topics for each of my questions seperately in case other people search for similar issues which will help them to find the answer faster .

My boss also needs to access an (Access) database. Problem is that it get changed frequently and is rather big (> 50MB). He told me that there are two options offered... to open the DB locally or to open it remotely. The DB (Access file) could reside on the webserver as then the management of the frequent updates would be the most (and pretty much only) comfortable thing to do.

Problem is tho that there is no way i could imagine to open the Access DB remotely from the HTTP webserver... which means the DB would get downloaded to a random temporary map with location unknown. Sadly in the configuration file it seems that the map needs to be hardwired (kinda logical actually).

So the question: do you guys see any practical way around this issue and is it maybe possible to open the Access file remotely (as my boss swears there is an option - but i just cant imagine how ODBC could manage a file stream from a HTTP server to be interpreted and handled as queryable DB content (as you might already guess we only need to read from this DB... no writing necessary - thats why it will change frequently by us centrally).

Thanks alot all for your time and input!

With kind regards,
Bernd.

[dpayer]

Are we talking about accessing this DB over the internet?

Why don't you look into VPNs so clients accessing the DB will be on the same (virtual) network?

[Neosoft Support]

Connecting to a remote Internet database from a desktop app can be very tricky, and not all database engines support it. It can be made to work with MySQL, but I'm sure about MS Access. The post below contains more information on this topic:

viewtopic.php?f=21&t=16152

[ZeeBoer]

@dpayer: thanks for the input but users of this application are foreign customer companies... I'd rather not have those in our production network

@NeoBook support: Thanks alot... already expected similar but my boss thought you might know some tricks to make Access DBs accessible via remote connections as the DB plugin seems to offer the option. I'll look into the link you sent and will try to figure sth out for him.

To the SQL suggestion... I myself would always choose SQL over Access (as for myself Access was dead the moment SQL saw the first working query), but sadly some people (under who my boss ) stick with old well known formats and don't feel like learning the SQL syntax anymore. Guess they have to pay the price for using old deprecated techniques xD.