8i Access 2000 incompatibility

[CTekMedia]

Our company is run off of an Oracle database written by an outside company. I am the webmaster for our company and have only limited experience writing databases. I am now adding dynamic content to our website and have a need to send/receive data from the Oracle DB into our website.

The company that wrote the Oracle DB doesn't want a direct tie from their DB to the web. They want me to write an Access DB between the website and their DB - we have a low volume of data so that is not a problem. However, they are telling me I have to write the program in Access 97 rather than 2000 because 2000 "is not compatible with Oracle 8i".

I have a hard time believing this and am not impressed with the work this company does in general (worst GUI I have seen in 15 years).

Are there any such Access/Oracle problems I should be aware of?

Thanks much in advance.

BT

 

[DougRomeWebDevel]

Though I don't know the specific answer, check out

http://office.microsoft.com/assistance/2000/owccned6.aspx

I would compare the release dates of Access2000 and Oracle 8i. Possibly Access was released before 8i.

If access isn't an option, considering using materialized views. You should be able to get read-only data from them.

Consider dumping the company.
PS If you are going to administer an 8i DB, get a third party tool. TOAD is great for developers, perhaps some DBAs could guve you their thoughts on tools.

 

[raygg]

1. Access 97 uses a visual basic dialect - as does word basic, etc. When our company upgraded our oracle batch app from oracle 7 to oracle 8i we also upgraded the GUI front end from a VB 5 to a VB 6 and the connection was upgraded from 16bit ODBC to 32 bit ODBC. As far as I know your protocol connection between ACCESS and Oracle would be ODBC. I cannot fathom why your supplier would recommend an older rather than a newer version of ACCESS in your situation.
2. I am a DBA and use TOAD and find it does a lot of things fast and sometimes better than the Oracle supplied tools - don't think twice -get it or a similar product as a productivity tool. In some situations though the Oracle tools work better. I have not tried the DBA extension to TOAD.

3. I endorse that last writer - look at another supplier and another web product. Oracle 9i has a lot of improvements and its related web hosting tools etc are much improved.

Good luck

 

[bookouri]

Your database doesnt know or care what front end you are using to access it. If you can build your front end in Access 2K, or 97, or vb or whatever its still going to connect through the same ODBC/OleDB connection.

 

[CTekMedia]

Thanks much everyone. You have verified what I thought had to be true, but figured I had better ask (for some weird reason I'm not right all of the time).

tks

BT