Why, oh why, is it so important to "improve" the tools?  Good Lord.  I have a socket wrench.  It doesn't do screws, but so what?  It's not designed to do screws.  It does nuts.  And if I change the socket, it will do a wide range of nuts, bolts, and other things that turn.  (That's the beauty of an extensible tool).

But there will always be those that know better.

was this guy from chicago and were his initials E.W.? if not, then there are 2 guys who may have some of "revolutionary toolkits" in their shelf  ;-)

Anonymous:

Why, oh why, is it so important to "improve" the tools?  Good Lord.  I have a socket wrench.  It doesn't do screws, but so what?  It's not designed to do screws.  It does nuts.  And if I change the socket, it will do a wide range of nuts, bolts, and other things that turn.  (That's the beauty of an extensible tool).

But there will always be those that know better.

 You missed the point. There's nothing wrong with improving an existing tool/implementation/object/et cetera. The problem is when your changes are actually moronic and don't make things better and, in fact, make things worse. There is a difference.

 What? You have a hammer with a nail extractor on it too?? Look - hammers don't pull out nails, they hammer them in.

sincerely,
Richard Nixon
 

Ah!  Multi-valued fields.  Every *real* relational database should support those.  Stupid M$ Access.

The curiosity is killing me -- what is "SAP" ?

 

There is a vast gulf between a flexible and extensible tool and simply using the wrong tool for the job. Unfortunately, we seem to be forever burdened by people attempting to drive nails with a screwdriver.

Are you sure this guy hasn't done infomercials?

I think that's a pretty good litmus test of a database professional: "What do you think of PICK, Advanced Revelation, and multi-valued fields in general?"

 When all you have is a hammer, everything pretty much looks like a nail...

Well I have an add-on for my hammer that converts it into bandsaw!  It's awfully unwieldy for pounding nails, but I think the benefits outweigh any downsides.

BrainSlugs83:

The curiosity is killing me -- what is "SAP" ?

 

A database system used by many corporations, infact.. think Access on Enterprise steroids.

BrainSlugs83:

The curiosity is killing me -- what is "SAP" ?

 

Perhaps you should ask.. What isn't SAP?

 
Just flip a few "switches", and SAP will instantaneously reflect your business model (no matter how complex) and provide you with real-time enterprisey goodness, thus justifying the millions of dollars you spent on (albeit well-dressed) highly-specialized SAP consultants (who in turn shelled out thousands for highly specialized SAP training camps).

 

I feel nauseus.
 

Oh, but I do get it.  I don't always express it well.

I deal with all kinds of folks who think that their way of doing things is right and everyone else should do it their way.  (I'm sometimes one of those people).  But a moronic change (which that looks like) is still a moronic change.  Sort of like adding a hammer head to said socket wrench.  When we change the fundamental nature of a tool (to make it better), we're as likely as not to ruin it. 

Access, for good or ill, is what it is.  If Mike had to pull things out of his hat (or somewhere else) to put a hammer head on a wrench, it is a true WTF.

Sincerely,

Jim Lang
 

Anonymous:

BrainSlugs83:

The curiosity is killing me -- what is "SAP" ?

 

A database system used by many corporations, infact.. think Access on Enterprise steroids.

OMFG. There is a database system called SAP-DB (now renamed to MAXDB),
but when someone says "SAP", changes are he means the ERP system made by German software company SAP AG. Most large enterprises, i.e. Microsoft, Coca Cola etc. run on SAP.

SAP is made of a "kernel" and a lot of programs written in ABAP, a proprietary (and IMO very ugly) Cobol-like language.

During the process of "customization", high-paid consultants write ABAP code to adapt SAP to the actual needs (interfaces to other systems etc.); it's even possible to write completely new programs in ABAP using the SAP workbench, so those new programs look and feel like SAP. Which is only desireable in organisations that already use SAP.

This makes everything that I have ever done in Access seem less embarrassing.

Anonymous:

was this guy from chicago and were his initials E.W.? if not, then there are 2 guys who may have some of "revolutionary toolkits" in their shelf  ;-)

I think guys inventing "revolutionary toolkits" (or frameworks etc.) are not exactly rare.
 

Anonymous:

BrainSlugs83:

The curiosity is killing me -- what is "SAP" ?

 

A database system used by many corporations, infact.. think Access on Enterprise steroids.

SAP is not a database.  I wouldn't even call it a database application, but I wouldn't argue too hard with someone who did. 

Oracle is Access on Enterprise steroids, just as DB2 is Access on Enterprise narcotics, and SQL Server is Access on Enterprise hallucinogens.

Anonymous:

Why, oh why, is it so important to "improve" the tools?  Good Lord.  I have a socket wrench.  It doesn't do screws, but so what?  It's not designed to do screws.  It does nuts.  And if I change the socket, it will do a wide range of nuts, bolts, and other things that turn.  (That's the beauty of an extensible tool).

But there will always be those that know better.

 

That socket wrench will also do screws, just like my hammer does screws. Also good for self-defense, reflex testing, glass removal, furniture distressing, doorstop, paperweight, helium party ballon anchor, and short range person-poker.

You just have to have "vision". 

 

I fail to see the point.  I own numerous hammers with nail extractors: we call them claws.

I also have one or two hammers without nail extractors, but that can either ball or peen a rivet.  I've never been on that intimate terms with my rivets.

BrainSlugs83:

The curiosity is killing me -- what is "SAP" ?

 

The sticky goo that comes out of trees when you cut thru the bark. Especially pine trees

Anonymous:

think about a dvd rewinding device.

 I gots to get me one of those!

 

captcha: Perfection. Somehow, highly appropriate, given the name of the WTF toolkit...

Sorry guys, but this is the 

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 END OF THE OFF-TOPIC DISCUSSION ABOUT SAP

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 Any further postings about SAP will be deleted.

"think about a dvd rewinding device."

But what if you wanted to watch it backwards? 

ammoQ:

proprietary

ammoQ:

very ugly

 these words seem to go together a lot...

 

and as far as a socket driving a screw, you can get screw bits for ratchets... very useful for screws that are rusted/corroded/just really hard to turn...
 

MS-Access 2007 is getting multi-valued fields. If you use the GUI to create applications, it will have all the traditional problems of multi-valued fields.

I have to chuckle.  I got my start in this industry by designing and maintaining Access DB's, at one company.
To this day, they still use them, even though I left 6 years ago with noone there to maintain them.
It is a fun app to play with if you only have 5-10 users.  Nevermind the documentation that states up to 255 users, it's a load of BS.  After you get 10-15 connections, pray to your favorite diety that all goes well.

You can't pay me enough to touch Access today (well, almost enough)

Never mind the collective wisdom represented by Microsoft's product designers

 

*cough*sputter* WHAT? this is access, right? 

The reason for Moneybags doing this is fairly obvious. He didn't get rich by being stupid (or ethical). His customers were not willing to accept obscure 4L applications that no one else could maintain anymore. The solution was to give them MS-Access applications that no one else could maintain.

The fact that he later went into SAP consulting also tells me that he knows where the money is. His latest specialty though is probably "SCOX Compliance" software. Directors of American companies are willing to write unlimited cheques for that. The more shareholder's money they spend on it, the more "compliant" they can prove they are trying to be.

Ron:

This makes everything that I have ever done in Access seem less embarrassing.

Amen to that, Ron!  Alex had a good quote a while back, something about the moment when young programmers find out that VBA is sometimes used to write entire applications. . .
 

Anonymous:

MS-Access 2007 is getting multi-valued fields. If you use the GUI to create applications, it will have all the traditional problems of multi-valued fields.

Yikes!  You aren't kidding.  a quick google brought this up:

http://www.pcw.co.uk/articles/print/2163161 

Sounds like under the hood it is all stored relationally, but as you mention, the GUI tools will somehow treat it as multiple values in 1 field.  This will end up being a huge mess.  I always liked Access and it introduced me to the RDBMS world, but this will really mess up lots of people learning the ropes of reltional databases if they start off with Access 2007.

I've always liked and defended Access, it is great for what it is designed to do, but this is a pretty tough pill to swallow.  We'll have to see how it is implemented.

I do understand that for people new to relational data, the idea of storing many values in 1 column is perhaps more intuitive than the concept of a related 1-to-many table, but learning that concept is key to understanding a relational database.  Hiding that concept from users is not a good idea, IMHO.  However, I suppose that you cannot fault Microsoft for doing their best to make sure that their software is as accessable and intuitive to new users as possible; as long as you still have the option to store things correctly. 

 

This is one of those stories that parents use to scare their children into being good, right?

Right? 

In either case, I love a good bedtime story. 

> Ah!  Multi-valued fields.  Every *real* relational database should support those.  Stupid M$ Access.

It might interest you to know that Access 2007 will support multi-valued fields with proper normalized tables underneath them. :)

Sorry ammoQ, did you get bit by SAP? 

Moderator's note: quote removed

Ah, I was going to laugh about getting on a plane to NC before you knew what the spec (or even the plan) was, but I remembered: oh yeah, consultant money for a week.

Hope the check cleared, anyway. 

Anonymous:

Sorry ammoQ, did you get bit by SAP? 

No, but it is my duty as a moderator to stop off-topic discussions before they spawn several pages and squeeze out the on-topic posts.
 

Alex Papadimoulis:

It was his way or the highway - and considering where we were, having been ferried from the airport by a now-vanished van, the highway was a long way away.

I have learned the hard way to never go anywhere I can't walk back or drive back from. This WTF could be a good prelude to a geek horror movie. You see, the coders start to disappear one by one as the project nears completion...

 But the scary part is...

Alex Papadimoulis:

this was the pre-Internet days... 

Noooooooo!!!!

Anonymous:

I think that's a pretty good litmus test of a database professional: "What do you think of PICK, Advanced Revelation, and multi-valued fields in general?"

God help me, I've had to convert people off of PICK once and off of Advanced Revelation once.  Into relational databases.  It's amazing what sort of crap can wind up in a database column in those abominations.

 The actual PICK database was running on the PICK operating system of course.  I had to get a black box to read the printer port and capture the output of their "print everything" report, parse out the reasonable values, and generate an exception list for the more bizarre stuff.

Now, the question is, do I pass your litmus test, or fail?

 

To be 'nitpicking' Pick should not be all caps. Its not an acronym, its named after the author, Dick Pick. Honest. 

Anonymous:

Anonymous:

I think that's a pretty good litmus test of a database professional: "What do you think of PICK, Advanced Revelation, and multi-valued fields in general?"

God help me, I've had to convert people off of PICK once and off of Advanced Revelation once.  Into relational databases.  It's amazing what sort of crap can wind up in a database column in those abominations.

 The actual PICK database was running on the PICK operating system of course.  I had to get a black box to read the printer port and capture the output of their "print everything" report, parse out the reasonable values, and generate an exception list for the more bizarre stuff.

Now, the question is, do I pass your litmus test, or fail?

 

BrainSlugs83:

"think about a dvd rewinding device."

But what if you wanted to watch it backwards? 

Then the rewinding device would have a 'reverse' switch, which would, um, wind it...

Anonymous:

I have to chuckle.  I got my start in this industry by designing and maintaining Access DB's, at one company.
To this day, they still use them, even though I left 6 years ago with noone there to maintain them.
It is a fun app to play with if you only have 5-10 users.  Nevermind the documentation that states up to 255 users, it's a load of BS.  After you get 10-15 connections, pray to your favorite diety that all goes well.

You can't pay me enough to touch Access today (well, almost enough)

don't forget that 500MB db limit. After which stuff goes haywire. I consulted for 6 months converting a company's access app to use mapped SQL Server databases when their data and user base got too big. <shiver>

BrainSlugs83:

"think about a dvd rewinding device."

But what if you wanted to watch it backwards? 

I need one. So fed up with renting a dvd movie and starting in the middle of the closing credits. Annoying.

Anonymous:

I think that's a pretty good litmus test of a database professional: "What do you think of PICK, Advanced Revelation, and multi-valued fields in general?"

 When all you have is a hammer, everything pretty much looks like a nail...

 

PICK is the devil

Pardon me, but what does 4GL mean or stand for?

 

 

Anonymous:

Pardon me, but what does 4GL mean or stand for? 

Fourth generation language. This was a popular concept during the late 80s, beginning 90s, before the OO boom. (Languages like C, Pascal etc. were considered 3rd generation)

4GLs were high-level languages focused on a certain type of application, mostly "database frontend" and allowed for rapid application development. Typical for 4GLs is the tight integration of GUI progamming, database access and report generation. For that reason, VisualBasic, Delphi and similar systems can be considered 4GLs, though no-one uses the term "4GL" anymore.

 

Edit: Wikipedia has a slightly different definiton. 

 

The company that I did my internship for did some contracting work for another company who was developing software for the moving and storage industry.  Unfortunately, this "software" was 1M+ lines of utter crap. 

Actually, it was more of a crap snowball.  It started out as a rather simple Access app.  However, more stuff was added.  Then more stuff.  Then still more stuff.  At no point was there an attempt to re-design it or re-architect it or anything - they just piled on more and more crap.  I think it had even been outsourced at one point in time, and the result was even more crap piled on, albeit crap written by people who didn't speak english and apparently were still learning how to code.  By the time the guys at my company got to it, it was a useless mess. 

Here's the kicker, though - remember how I said that there was never an attempt to re-design it?  Remember how I said that it was originally an Access app?  Well, this was supposed to be enterprise-level software.  Entire companies were supposed to run on it. This meant - you guessed it - hundreds of people using it simultaneously.  This was accomplished by running the software on a server, and then having users employ Windows Terminal Services to remote into the server to use the MS Access program.

It was so sad watching these poor guys trying to get this awful software to work.  I think they had one actual company that was running the software, and they were always going down.

The company that I was interning for is still around.  The company they were contracting for is not.

Tree years ago I worked in a project leaded by the same kind of "Enterprisey Genius Guy". One of his wonderfull ideas was writen a Prolog-like interpreter in swing, a sort of "graphical parser", with all lexical, syntatical an semantical rules of HIS "wonderful enterprisey" dialect implemented in it!

Anonymous:

You can't pay me enough to touch Access today (well, almost enough)

 
That's a shame, because used properly it's a great tool.  For quick
reports, data entry forms, interfacing into several different RDBMS,
conversion tools, DB utilities written in VBA, exports and imports,
quick and easy storage of relational data for single users, and so
on, it is great tool.  To try to use it for purposes for which it is not
intended (i.e., hosting data for a busy webserver or for as a backend
for a busy multi-user database) and of course it won't work so well for you.

Give me MS Access, you take any tool or set of tools you want (the more enterprisey the better!), I'll have that
conversion done much faster than you ... complete with any necessary
manual data entry forms, reports, utilities and macros to automate
tasks and validate data, local mapping tables, links to multiple ODBC
datasources, and everything else all in 1 MDB file.  You really can't
beat it for that.

Anonymous:

Pardon me, but what does 4GL mean or stand for?

 

 Welcome to the Internet. Since this is your first time, I'll give you a hand. In the future, please refer questions of this nature to google.com  Below are the results of such a query.

Progress 4GL

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Progress 4GL is a 4GL programming language developed by Progress Software Corporation.

It uses an imperative style to do database access. Instead of using embedded SQL expressions, Progress 4GL uses "FOR EACH" expressions to query
a database or single "FIND" expressions. Next to database access
expressions there is a variety of expressions to define and control forms. The language contains IF..THEN..ELSE statements and DO...WHILE statements for flow control.

 

Anonymous:

Oh, but I do get it.  I don't always express it well.

I deal with all kinds of folks who think that their way of doing things is right and everyone else should do it their way.  (I'm sometimes one of those people).  But a moronic change (which that looks like) is still a moronic change.  Sort of like adding a hammer head to said socket wrench.  When we change the fundamental nature of a tool (to make it better), we're as likely as not to ruin it. 

Access, for good or ill, is what it is.  If Mike had to pull things out of his hat (or somewhere else) to put a hammer head on a wrench, it is a true WTF.

Sincerely,

Jim Lang
 

 

Since you have not registered for an account, I have no way to know if you are the Jim Lang who I responded to or if you are just claiming to be that Jim Lang. I will address you as Jim Lang #2 (and the original poster is Jim Lang #1). Jim Lang #1 made an overly broad statement that said that any modification of a tool is a WTF. I replied that this is not the case. It is not the modification but both how it is being modified and what the improved utility is. Modifying a tool can be useful and smart.

Jim Lang #2, your only reply should have been: You are right Mr. Nixon, Jim Lang #1 made an overly broad statement that is not correct.

sincerely, 

 Richard Nixon

Heh... A couple years ago my company sales force moved from Goldmine to some proprietary "vertical market" application, based on Access. At first I figured that this application would just use the standard strategy of "splitting" the front end from the tables, keeping the table .MDB file on a network share.

Then, I started hearing complaints of the network slowing to a crawl every few hours. Sure enough, I found that every one of the 35+ sales people were running with a *complete copy* of the database, and that whenever they wanted their updates to be seen by everyone else, they would click a button to run the "synchronize" function, which was starting to take almost an hour to run: yes, several times a day 35 desktops would share and synchronize their 300MB databases with each other. I don't want to even think about the data anomalies this likely produced.

Since then I have never been surprised at what I find with Access-related products.

Unklegwar:

That socket wrench will also do screws, just like my hammer does screws. Also good for self-defense, reflex testing, glass removal, furniture distressing, doorstop, paperweight, helium party ballon anchor, and short range person-poker.

Ah ha!  I knew there was something else I should be able to use my socket wrench for.  Thanks for the tip!