Hi
Sorry if you've talked about this in the last few weeks.. I'm way behind in
my email WC. I don't dare just delete it as it's always full of good stuff.
We have the following senario and most of this is not negotiable except the
DB engine... so no Linux comments please. :)
This is being done on a WinNT4 server using Cold Fusion and Access. My
"manager" asked me to ask around as he constantly feels that Access is not
up to it. I think he just wants a bit of justification/encouragement to go
to MSSQL server.
Our Faculty has over 5200 students. Each night I'm sent a list of all 5200+
students, their name/s, student number etc. (about 4 fields in all). I'm
also sent 14000+ individual unit-student combinations. i.e. a list of all
the unique student-unit pairs. I read the student data into a table and
then read the unit data into another table (with a joint primary key).
There is also a bit of fiddling with the data as there is a bit of extra
stuff in the files like inverted commas, leading and trailing spaces and I
have to extract the first name from a given names field, though there is a
preferred name field also.
This allows me/lecturers to get out student info and see which units they
are in and also list of who is in a unit. The information will also be use
to provide info for some of the site authentication and help provide a more
personal experience for the student. (Lecturers already have access to much
of the info via the Uni's "Data Warehouse" but we need to intergrate it
into our web sites)
Anyway, once this is all in the Access DB I can manipulate it at will and
that aspect works just fine.
The server that does this has plenty of power and RAM but it still maxes
out the CPU while it is converting the info from a text file to the DB
format. It would quite often fail on that server if I asked CF to do a
"transaction"; a method of keeping the old info while the new stuff was
being put in with the ability to roll back if it all went horribly wrong.
I think it was running out of disk space for it's temporary files on drive
C: Most of the data etc is on a much much larger drive D:. This all worked
well on my test system at home as it has plently of space. I guess more
room would help solve the problem but then again... how much would be hard
to work out. I suppose getting it do use drive D: for temporary files would
be a great help also.
Ok... the question is... what are your thoughts about Access and MSSQL
servers. Don't tell me it depends of load, transactions, number of records
etc... ;-)
I think you may have guessed by now that this is not "my" question but my
"Kontrolers'" and I got "raised eyebrows" last week when I didn't ask as
requested. :(
thanks
Bruce
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