Morning Berrie, On 22/05/13 13:41, berrie_at_m wrote:
> I am on a LAN with approx. 150 users. I want to enable every user to enter 6 > fields of data (date, time, name, what, where, follow-up), without the > ability to see what other users have entered, or the ability to go back later > and manipulate their or other entries (as this could be somewhat sensitive > data). > I managed to create this with MS Access on a laptop, but found out that > apparently each user needs to have MS Access installed to be able to enter > data. Is Firebird the right application for this? Access is a desktop "database" and isn't really suited to one database being shared by numerous people. It can be done, but for 150 users?, best not. I've suffered numerous corruptions on shared Access databases and I think (well, my opinion is) that Access is a single user, desktop database and nothing else - it wasn't designed for multi-user access and had it (badly) bolted on. Other opinions are available however! Firebird is not a desktop database, it can be with embedded or local installations, but it is a client server database. This means that there is a database server machine (which can be the same one as the client) and this server runs the Firebird software that controls all the databases on the server. The client talks to the server, and the appropriate database, over the network - or locally in the case of embedded/local use. Firebird is designed to be multi-user safe, and works extremely well indeed. Your 150 users on the LAN, however, will need something that allows them to communicate with the database. In Access, that was Access or VBA itself, with forms, grids and so on. Firebird doesn't provide this because Firebird is a database and not a database application. You can use FlameRobin as your database Adminstrator tool if you need a GUI based system, or you can use the command line tools supplied with Firebird - isql/gbak and so on. The users would need an application - possibly similar to the one you built/used under Access - but you (or some developers) would need to build one in Delphi, or wxWidgets, Qt, C++ or whatever. The data that your users get to see would be linked to their own user id on the database, your application would connect to the database itself as the owner, for example, and then read a USER table where all the authorised users of the system would have their details, and a user_id column. That user_id column would also be part of every record of the data you mention - so you would have 150 different user_ids and each one would have some or lots of data "owned" by the user_id in question. The application would be created in such a way as to only read data from the data table(s) which has the same user_id as the logged on user. So, is Firebird the right database? Most likely, yes, it is - for security and resilience. However, you will need to build your application to allow not only the entry, retrieval and reporting (if necessary) of the user's own data, but also, to maintain those users as well - adding new ones, "deleting" old ones and so on. (Probably marking them as "deleted" but not actually deleting them - but that deepens on whether or not the data they created needs to be retained after they have left the company - business rules will dictate this). HTH Cheers, Norm. -- Norman Dunbar Dunbar IT Consultants Ltd Registered address: Thorpe House 61 Richardshaw Lane Pudsey West Yorkshire United Kingdom LS28 7EL Company Number: 05132767
