Re: FWD: Discouraging supervisor from tangential assignment

["Steven J. Owens" <puff -at- netcom -dot- com>]

Anonymous Poster writes:
> I have been told that I will be in charge of creating a database for the
> documentation and product packaging groups in my company.
> [...]
> How can I convince my supervisor that I cannot possibly develop the
> database without devoting all my time to it?

     Go ahead and do it, treat it as a learning experience.  You're
not a professional access developer and you're not doing this as your
core job function, so don't sweat its stability.  If it wasn't
important enough for them to hire a professional access developer,
it's not important enough for you to worry about it :-).  A couple of
words of advice:

     First, make sure you have a mentor, one of the wizards who knows
access inside and out.  If you don't have any of those available, talk
to the wizards and see what they'd suggest you write it in, and come
back with a proposal to do it in that.

     Access is fairly limited as a database (it doesn't support
relational operations, for example).  Odds are, if you do go with
access, most of what you'll be doing will be cobbling together the
"screens", the dialogs to read data from the database.  I don't really
know access - I try to keep my involvement with it to a minimum :-) -
but this should be fairly straightforward.  You'll also be doing all
the task analysis and figuring out what dialogs you need, etc.

     I'd strongly suggest you maintain a regular regimen of dumping
the tables out to text files and making backups of them, as well as
making backups of the access files.  Access has a tendency to corrupt
data irretrievably.  If you save it to text files, at least you can do
do a big import and not have to retype it all.

     You might want to consider writing it in FileMaker Pro, which is
a PC database package that is a bit more accessible (to coin a
phrase).  Or even better (depending on your needs), do it as a web
project, with HTML forms, perl/CGI, and MySQL.

Steven J. Owens
puff -at- netcom -dot- com