Commentary

I know what you are saying. “Ya, right!”

However, I am serious. My main resolution is to post more often on databaselessons.com.

I will start with a serious of postings about queries.

If you have been at the MS Access game for a while, you may find most of these query postings too simple. Well, this site is for people that are just shedding the pure wizard approach to MS Access, and so you may be right.

As always, please leave comments if you have a good one.

Thanks for reading.

Richard “Manxman” Killey

The open source alternatives to MS Access that I have looked at over the years did not match my favourite database’s full set of features.

A new offering is Kexi, which is a Free/Libre and Open-Source integrated data management application. Kexi is a long awaited Open Source competitor for products like Microsoft Access. Kexi can be used for creating database schemas, inserting data, performing queries, and processing data. Forms can be created to provide a custom interface to your data. All database objects – tables, queries and forms – are stored in the relational database, making it easy to share data and design.

Unfortunately, although Python and Ruby programming languages are supported (beta stage) and JavaScript support is in development, scripting is not yet available on the Windows version.

I do not think I could live without VBA. It makes Access what it is for me. Here is a link to the scripting info for Kexi.

For now, I have to sit in the wings, until the scripting is ported to the Windows version of Kexi.

I sent out a new article today. First one in months. I have the same 24 hours as everyone else, but …

No, I am not going to take the easy way out with an excuse.

Anyhow. Received 2 comments. One via the website and one via email. I appreciate both comments, even though they both were against me (at least a little!). The website comment was in regards to this posting about php and mysql. If you visit the posting you can read the comment.

My response? What can I say? I let my subscribers down. Read more »

I was reminded today why I avoid activeX components. Someone was having trouble installing a small Access database on to their computer. (I did NOT create the database) We quickly traced the problem to an older version of an OCX file on their computer. After 3 attempts to unregister/re-install/re-register the ocx file we finally got it working. Fortunately, this computer was walking distance from my desk. What if it had been in an office in another city?

What was the offending activeX control? A calendar. If you have not already done so, see my series about a calendar control that is pure Access (no activeX) starting at this web page.

Today I was working on some code that I have been asked to enhance. I came across the following bit of code.

if a = b then
   do something that does NOT affect a or b
   do something else that does NOT affect a or b
   if a = b then
      do a lot of stuff
   endif
endif

Why are there 2 identical if statements, with no code inbetween that affects the comparison test?

This reminds me of the article I wrote, called Working with Other Developers. Please spend at least a little bit of time on the “look-and-feel” of your VBA code. It makes it much easier for someone else (maybe even you) to read and understand your logic.

p.s. another problem with the system I am working on is that it has a lot of orphaned code. That is, code that is no longer attached to an object, and will never run. Some of this code causes the Access compiler to choke and sputter, and I depend on the compiler to help me find errors. Hence, I had to spend time getting rid of the orphaned stuff.