Hi there,


I've got a desktop with WinXP and my laptop with dual OS', Red Hat9 and XP. For a university project I've created a Visual Basic application which reads the data from a DB created in Access XP. There is an important lack of teaching in the UK universities regarding to non-microsoft OS enviroments so that's why I want to start showing to my tutors that linux can do much better than windows using it for my practical assignments, and that it is not just an alternative Os. My question is, is there any way to install the database in linux as file server and read the data from the application installed in my desktop(XP)?. I've tried with samba but id doesn't seems to work.
Can anybody give a hand?, I'm a newbie so I know the basic but please I appreciate a nice explanation...cheers!!!


Meistwer

Never sub-estimate the power of stupid people when they get 2gether

Umm, If your suggesting that the fileserver and the VB app would be running on the same machine, the no. Even if you could, there would be no point.

If on the other hand your suggesting keeping the Access db on a *seperate* linux fileserver, then yes you could, but there would still be no point.

What you could try instead, is recreate your database on an opensource db server, like MySQL or PostgreSQL, and connect to it from multiple instances of your VB app through ODBC (incredibly easy in VB if your already ADO for your connection: con.Open "DSN=MyDatabasesDSN" ) The only thing you'd really need to worry about is some of your SQL may need to be changed (probably nothing that major, but IIRC Access uses slightly different operators to the other db's).

This would not really demonstrate linux since these db's will run on windows as well, but it would show that opensource can produce software as good, if not better, than massive corporations.

Yep, the VB app will be in the XP side of the desktop as client, and the DB in the linux side of the laptop acting as file server. The problem is that I have the presentation of this at the end of the week and I dont have to much time to recreate the DB....
Do you any other way?

Meistwer

Never sub-estimate the power of stupid people when they get 2gether

Hmm, found this forum, seems you can pretty much export you access database straight into a blank mysql database through ODBC

http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/topic/22069-1.html

(near the bottom, by zoetropeuk)

Actually this should work, pretty much from any db, to any db.

This is page from the mysql chapter with advise on using the OBDC connection from various programs including access and ADO

http://www.mysql.com/documentation/m...ents.html#ODBC

thanks for your providing links.