multiple back-ends

  • Thread starter Thread starter Irene_58
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Irene_58

Hi,
I have 3 or 4 databases developed separarely over the past couple of years
covering different areas of company activities - project monitoring, support
call monitoring, QHSE monitoring etc. The company has grown and I'm looking
to consolidate and distribute these. I'd intended to split them into FE/BE
so that the just the appropriate FEs could be installed on any user's PC and
the back-ends would reside on the server. I'd thought at first that I could
have a "core" BE with e.g. a staff and client table and activity specific
BEs. But the activity tables have the core tables PKs as FKs. Does this
mean I have to put all the tables into 1 BE? or am I missing something?
 
Yes, 1 BE. You want to do that anyway so you can create queries, forms and
reports across multiple activities.

Steve
(e-mail address removed)
 
Irene

If you haven't gotten a response yet covering your question about PKs and
FKs, here's some thoughts...

If you are saying that each of your (3 or 4) databases have "core" tables,
and those cores are the same topics, but the data in each "core" table is
different, from app to app, then yes, you have a potential issue in
connecting the core records with their respective child table records.

For example, if all dbs have a core tblPerson table, but App1 has John Doe
as PersonID=1, while App2 has Bill Smith as PersonID=1, and so on, then you
clearly cannot expect the non-core tables that point to tblPerson to have
the correct foreign keys (most of the time).

I guess I'm having trouble visualizing what you mean by "the activity tables
have the core tables PKs as FKs". Is that the same as saying that the
activity tables are your "child" tables?

More info, please...

Regards

Jeff Boyce
Microsoft Access MVP

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Hi,
I have 3 or 4 databases developed separarely over the past couple of years
covering different areas of company activities - project monitoring, support
call monitoring, QHSE monitoring etc. The company has grown and I'm looking
to consolidate and distribute these. I'd intended to split them into FE/BE
so that the just the appropriate FEs could be installed on any user's PC and
the back-ends would reside on the server. I'd thought at first that I could
have a "core" BE with e.g. a staff and client table and activity specific
BEs. But the activity tables have the core tables PKs as FKs. Does this
mean I have to put all the tables into 1 BE? or am I missing something?
Click to expand...

I think the nub of your problem is - as you have evidently gathered - that
Relationships with referential integrity enforced can only be established
between tables in the same backend. Unless there is some very good reason to
do otherwise (such as the size of the backend approaching the 2GByte limit, or
really critical security issues) I'd use a single backend; although you can
create queries joining tables across two backends, performance will suffer.
And you *do* lose referential integrity.

You might want to look into SQL Server Express as a shared backend.
 
I'm new to using the community and, embarrisingly, I seem to have linked to a
old snapshot page - so I didn't realise anyone had replied. Thanks for
replying, and sorry for the delay in getting back to you.

Simplified: I have a tStaff and a tJobNo table that I consider "core"
because all our company info is in it (part of the main job management db).
I have an old db for handling quality issues. It also had a tStaff table and
a tQIssue table which had a look-up / reference to the tStaff table for the
person raising the issue. I want to amalgamate the 2 dbs, and I'd though to
have a back-end specific for the quality db with tQIssue but with tStaff in
the main db. However, I don't see how to reference the main tStaff from the
quality back-end.
(My data isn't that huge - I can just put everything in 1 back-end. I just
want to be sure what's the best way to handle it.)
 
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