Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Migration from Access

A few months ago, we hired a consultant to work with a group of users and start to migrate from the numerous access database applications and excel spreadsheet "applications" to APEX. At the time it was APEX 2.0. We created them a database on a little used server and gave the consultant about 100 gig of storage and a list of items the consultant must do and must not do written into the contract.

We have heard very little about the project, the manager in charge pretty much left them on their own. Today we had a meeting which turned out to be the "wrap-up" meeting for the project. The consultant and the users, in under 4 months converted 16 MS Access databases and 44 excel spreadsheets to APEX applications. LDAP authentication and centrally managed user list as all the apps are in a single APEX workspace. The project is magnificent! The users are happy, all the rules have been adhered to and the consultant came in under the time limit getting the bonus money that was part of the contract. Everybody is happy all around. I looked into the DB, proper referential integrity, very few bad SQL, the schema is organized well with non shared tables prefixed with a TLA that they came up for that particular MS access or excel application. Applications talk to each other when necessary and the users are reporting much better productivity and no missing transactions or data.

Every application is snappy and efficient. The consultant and the project user lead also signed off on retiring the 155 MS Access licenses, which will be a nice thing to stop paying for when we renew.

All and all, a good day!

APEX is amazing... I still struggle with some basics on it... but I am a DBA, not a developer. We already have another meeting with the consultant to put them onto another APEX project we have waiting in the wings.



6 comments:

Dimitri Gielis said...

Congratulations with your APEX apps!
APEX is great, nice to see it gets more famous.

Dimitri

Unknown said...

Nice to hear of such a successful project. How about naming the successful consultant and giving them some well deserved publicity?

Herod T said...

I would love to.

But I can't, technically I have already said too much. Privacy rules etc.

Besides, we need the consultant for about the next 2 years :)

Patrick Wolf said...

Just stumbled over your posting. Sounds really interesting!!

I'm sure the people from the Oracle APEX team would be happy to make a case study out of it.

Greetings from Vienna
Patrick

Unknown said...

Herod T,

I am the Product Manager for Oracle Application Express. I would love the opportunity to talk to you about Oracle APEX.

As Patrick said we would love to have you as a reference for migrating from MS Access to Oracle APEX.

Please email me at david.peake@oracle.com so we can talk further.

Regards,
David

Herod T said...

David,

Just in case you check back here, I sent you an email on this.

Thanks.