I should perhaps tell you more about the application ... it's a data table
that's looked up by CF. It's for the Australian Consumers Association.
When we do a test on a product, we want the results to be available. So you
can put your preferences, dimensions etc and your priorities for ease of
use, colours etc and the resulting table will give you the best buy for you.
Some of these interactive apps are very small, quite short-lived and low
traffic. They never involve the user inputting data. (I'd always use
SQLServer for capturing any data from the user, e.g. polls, feedback, forms
etc). The problem is the time taken to get the data from the test labs into
SQLServer from the spreadsheets they use to collate their results. If we
can use the spreadsheets, we can eliminate probably 80% of the cost of these
interactive things and reduce the development time greatly.
The usage of some of these is very high, and we'd continue to use SQL for
those. The ones I'm thinking about are where we might get 300-1500 accesses
a month.
Does that change any of your opinions about using Excel spreadsheets as
datasource?
Incidentally I like the idea of using an Access database and linking to the
spreadsheets, so I won't have problems swapping out the spreadsheets. I
hadn't thought of that aspect yet.
Cheers,
Mike Kear
Windsor, NSW, Australia
AFP WebWorks
-----Original Message-----
From: Robert Crooks [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Thursday, September 06, 2001 1:28 AM
To: CF-Talk
Subject: RE: Excel as a datasource .... ?
I have to agree with this -- my experience is that going low-end on the data
store always proves to be a bad decision in the long run.
One note on Excel that I haven't seen posted in this thread: I have seen
spreadsheets start to develop serious data corruption problems as they grow
beyond a certain size -- this may be dependent on system virtual memory
availability.
Robert Crooks
Technical Lead
Macromedia Educational Services
<http://www.allaire.com/conference/index.cfm>
-----Original Message-----
From: Alex [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Wednesday, September 05, 2001 10:04 AM
To: CF-Talk
Subject: Re: Excel as a datasource .... ?
excel as a datasource would make maintainability, scalability, and
enhancements alot harder and in the long run cost more. Actually, at one
place I worked at we charged more if the client wanted to use Access over
SQLServer (I assume excel as a datasource would cost even more).
On Wed, 5 Sep 2001, Mike Kear wrote:
>
> I have a client who's complaining that the time spent generating a small
app
> using SQL is costing too much and wants to use excel spreadsheets instead.
>
> What's your experience using excel as a datasource?
>
> Just to clarify what the projects do, they don't write to the datasource,
> just look up and filter the data customising tables for the user's needs.
> The volumes aren't great - between a few hundred page views a month to
5000
> or so.
>
> IS there likely to be implications for the usage of RAM and resources on
the
> server? The System Admin is already complaining that he has to restart
the
> server too often and when the processor usage gets to 100% he panics and
> complains.
>
>
> Cheers,
> Mike Kear
> Windsor, NSW, Australia
> AFP WebWorks
>
>
>
>
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