We use an MS Access database for a couple of processes, but two of my co-workers see the numbers in different formats in the same database and that’s a problem sometimes.
For example:
33.743,000
33,743.000
Where can I set both to have the same format?
That is caused by different regional settings of for number formats in Windows.
Adjust these to match - or leave them as is.
The difference shouldn't cause problems for display - that's the purpose of these settings.
However, if you use the format for export of data, some method must be used to force a format of the exported data.
Related
My office has a Filemaker database which they asked me to replace with a mySQL one. The mySQL one is now set up and running, but doesn't have exact same structure as the Filemaker one (they asked for more things to be added, redundant things were left out, etc.).
I've seen that the filemaker data can be exported as .xml files, could I use those to populate the mySQL database?
If so, I've only ever used
Cooktop,but I'm currently using mac10.6/lubuntu, is there maybe an equivalent (free) piece of software that could do that?
All suggestions are welcome.
Thanks
I can add some information about the various export formats that FileMaker provides. I've done extensive research and testing on this topic.
Below, you'll see a chart with all of the formats that FileMaker offers along the top. Along the side, you'll see various features of these file formats that are unique to FileMaker when exporting. Some are limitations of the FileMaker export process and others are general pros and cons of the format itself.
I'll explain them briefly:
Headers: column labels are exported
Delimiter: the type of separator symbol used
UTF 8/16: yes if either of these is available, could be of concern for special characters or some languages
Only 1 format: means that only one type of encoding is available
Other encoding: a list of all encoding options
Can be imported: FileMaker allows import (not important for this question)
Future proof: According to Wikipedia, format is still widely used and actively maintained
Open standard: open source format
Size: when exporting one of our tables, this was the size of the file
I would recommend also considering some of these factors when deciding which format will work for you. It will depend on the contents and type of your data.
MySQL is just the backend database, so you need a UI to perform the import. You could use FileMaker for this as well, if you set up the MySQL database as an ESS source. If you do this, then you can use familiar import steps in FileMaker to populate your new database.
This may be what the previous answer mentions, but just to designate between the ODBC insert via Execute SQL, which is limited, and External SQL Sources (ESS) that give a native UI in FM.
If the FileMaker database is hosted on a server, you could setup an ODBC link to the MySQL. You could then create a script, in FileMaker, to loop through the data, creating rows in MySQL with only the Columns you are looking to populate.
Other than that, you can export the data, from FileMaker, into many other formats including; TAB, CSV, Excel, xml and pushing it into MySQL.
Before I begin, yes I know everything I am about to explain is back-asswards but at the moment it is what I have to work with.
My organization is in the middle of a Cognos 10 BI implementation, at the moment we are having HUGE performance issues with the data cubes, severely hampering our end users ability to slice data in an ad-hoc fashion. Historically we used large data extracts from SAP, manipulated in ms-access to provided a data source that was updated daily that end users could Pivot around in Excel.
As this is NOT transactional data, it worked as we never had more than a half million records, performance was never an issue.
As our implementation team has been unable to provide management with functioning data cubes we can use to provide static views and reports I have been tasked with using Cognos data extracts to re-create the old system temporarily.
The issue I am running into is that randomly, 3 times a week, 1 time the next, the files will contain unparsable records. I doubt it is a special character issue as I can re-download the file and it functions fine the 2nd or 3rd time.
Does anyone have any experience with something similar? I realize the data sets provided by Cognos were not designed for this purpose, but it seems strange that 20 percent of the files will contain corruptions. Also strange is that when I select a .xls spreadsheet as the download format, it seems to be a Unicode text file with the extension changed to .xls
Any insight would be appreciated.
EDIT: Diffing the files will be my next experiment, even though they are byte for byte comparable, I HAVE however compared the specific records that are unparsable in one file, yet parsable in the next and have not found any difference.
As for the import, I manually convert the file to a Unicode text and import it from that format.
I'm building medium sized business web application, data is being saved on a MySQL database.
I'm trying to think of a way of adding certain selectable "widgets" to that application (e.g. a currency widget - which will show user specified currencies when the web app is visible) but having an hard time deciding how to save the widget data and settings per user since the widgets do not have a common base.
For example, the currency widget's settings is totally different than say, a weather widget.
One will require a list of desired currencies, and one would require the weather's target location.
I thought of solving the above by keeping all the widget's settings data encoded in the "widgetData" column of a db table which will contain the userId, widgetId and widgetData.
I chose JSON as my way of encoding, and each time a user tries to load it's page, I have to decode it's settings and hand the user the desired data based on the settings.
The same is true for saving the widget's actual data which does not have a common base itself.
Hopefully I can solve this by using a NO-SQL data structure next time, but this is not the case for the current project.
The Entity Attribute Value database model would be useful very to you in this scenario.
It's much more flexible than JSON or XML or other types of formats because it works within your standard SQL data storage, albeit in a different manner.
I voted up the EAV solution because this is one of the valid reasons for using it, but don't fall in love with it. An advantage of EAV is that it is database-native to the extent that you can write queries in SQL to query it (find me all widgets missing some setting and then add it), while most engines do not have JSON support.
On the other hand, if you want/need to query within a column which contains structured data, XML is a better option than JSON (right now): http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/xml-functions.html#function_extractvalue
If your widgets are rendered via Javascript in the browser, then your solution is perfectly fine. Your widgetData remains a JSON string, in Javascript you use JSON.parse() to turn it into an object and render it, and JSON.stringify() to turn it back into a string before posting it back to your server.
I have a 3rd party system a user uses which requires the user manually import new data when the user chooses. I have a view in MS SQL server that has the fields in the exact order that is wanted.
This 3rd party system needs the export file in a comma quote format. For this I want every single field surrounded with quotes and not just the ones that contain the field delimiter (a comma).
I have worked with the configuration files to try and customize how csv is exported. It seems the available options for the CSV renderer does not allow me to get to this format. I think? Am I making this more difficult than I need to? What do I need to do to get to a format like this?
Seeing as this report could be run without any parameters every time I am contemplating setting up a thing with Python, as I could accomplish exactly what I want in a very small number of lines of code. However, it would be nice if I could use SSRS as it takes away my need to figure out the delivery of the export file and is also a simple enough interface any user should be able to figure out how to use it.
Thanks.
MSSQL is a data source, to get data out of. Since you are simply looking for a way to extract data from the database, a python script to create the file exactly as you wish would be the simples explanation. K.I.S.S. :)
ORIGINAL QUESTION (How can I display images from a MySQL database in an Access 2007 form?)
I would like to use Access 2007 to interface to a MySQL database and display pictures and other data in a form.
I already have an Access 2007 application that I don't want to change much, if I can help it. I'm just not sure what data type will work. "Attachment Data Type" is not supported in MySQL. Also, my client wants to be able to open and edit the image.
SOLUTION to UPDATED QUESTION
(How can I work around the 2GB database limit of MS Access (for displaying images)?)
(1) Store the filenames of the images in MS Access
(2) Use VBA to dynamically display them in a form (see How to display images from a folder in a form, a report, or a data access page).
To make the images editable:
(1) Make sure the file type (e.g. ".jpg") is associated with the image editor of choice.
(2) Using the same variable names as in the article mentioned above, add the following code to the form in which ImageFrame is located (see How to open a file in its default application using VBA)
Private Sub ImageFrame_Click()
Application.FollowHyperlink (txtImageName)
End Sub
A few other sources that may be useful
Perl, MySQL, and Blobs
VB, MySQL, and Blobs
Using images in Access
Using MS Access as a front end to PostgreSQL.
A special thanks to MindStalker for his comment that got me started on yet another round of "Googling".
See the solution mentioned in the question above.