Bob:
How nice to hear from you again.
In answer to your questions:
1. Is it split? If not, it should be (even in development as that can keep you from losing everything should corruption creep in.
A: I do not yet know what split means.
2. If you are working on this and it is on a server and you are working on it from your machine, then any network disruption can cause corruption, especially if not split but even when split. But in that case it usually hoses the frontend and not the backend data.
A: It is not on my server yet. We have had bad thunder storms and some problems therein with loss of power.
3. To fix it you would normally import everything into a brand new database file. If you get some errors when importing note what object name is showing in the importing form as that will tell you what you need to fix or replace.
A: I will be working on this.
4. Sometimes it just takes rebuilding something. Not fun, so having backups is essential.
A: I have a back up with all original tables. But I was at a point where I had to go back and forth from Forms to tables to Reports and so forth. I do not mind rebuilding because I need the practice.
I am a research scientist and statistician by training. But the market for that is waning. The reason is that most of my clients can no longer afford a full IT staff to provide support to researchers, and they can hardly afford any research at all beyond what their management thinks of as reports. So after 30 years of battling IT departments, I must become the itinerant IT department because there are no IT departments to battle with. I have been moving in this direction for 15 years.
I have been writing complex queries since I moved to Access and SQL from dBase around 1997. But it has always been to get the data in the form I need to conduct some statistical analysis. I have never written many forms or reports. I put a query in Excel for a table (report) and paste that into the report (text), and open it in a statistics program for analysis.
Different sorts of queries are needed for forms and reports, using dates etc. Now I am writing entire applications so the data an organization needs for research to support accreditation and so forth is already in the proper form, and the analysis can in fact be a report. Toward this end I have purchased a server to run apps and to host my own website. I know too much to take courses, so the best way is to buy the equipment and learn to use it. Buying the equipment is also much cheaper than taking courses.
I work with mental health and disability organizations that are either non-profit or quasi-governmental (half privatized). They have on average about 250 staff and 3,000 annual clients, with gross revenue of about 5 mill. They are hurting bad, and if they cannot upgrade in some way they will be taken over by managed care corporations. This is true all across the US, not just my current state (Georgia).
The last client I worked with had no IT director at all and no one who understood their network at all; they have 8-10 old servers all about ready to crash. So I have to be their IT department from the day I walk in the door, and I have to train young IT people to run the product before I leave, and do this for $30K each. That is my mission. There are about 150 such organizations in my state alone, and the situation is the same everywhere else. Every single one of them needs this database for accreditation. Not even managed care corporations have anything like this.
It is great talking with you,
D F Scudder, PhD
