No. 34

June 12, 2001

 

Technology:

MyAccess

This is an obscure little utility most people will never have a use for, but those who do use it, will eagerly pay the $30 shareware fee to its creator, Hubertus Hiden from Krieglach, Germany. I did and have been grateful to Hubertus for creating this - it made a small but important part of my life so much easier.

Here's the problem I faced:
I decided to switch my Web database development platform from the proprietary and expensive MS Access/ColdFusion combo to the free, open-source MySQL/Zope environment. With significant amounts of data already stored in several MS Access databases I had to move a dozen or so tables to MySQL. Not a big deal, right? Just export the data as delimited text files and import it into MySQL using its relatively powerful commands and qualifiers. Well, that turned out to be much bigger a challenge, mostly due to problems with the data itself (traditional field and text delimiters such as comma, single quotes, double quotes, etc. were interspersed within the data willy-nilly by the people who entered it) but also due to the way MS Access stores and formats the data (e.g. data that was copy-and-pasted from Web pages retained invisible characters such as line breaks; date fields were all but nontransferable). After a lot of trial-and-errors I finally managed to transfer most of the data, but some in undesirable format (e.g. date as text), and some in dire need of "cleaning up" to remove badly converted special characters.

In desperation I turned to the Web for help and quickly found that help in the form of MyAccess. It installs very simply, as an Add-In to MS Access and allows connecting to a local or remote MySQL database. With this connection in place one can open MySQL table from within MS Access as if it were a native MS Access table and then enter data, add fields, change a field's property, etc. without knowing anything about SQL. One can also design an entirely new table and then click the Acc2MySQL button to converted it to a MySQL table. Finally, but perhaps most importantly, converting existing, data-filled MS Access tables into MySQL ones is a snap, with data-type matching being done automatically and accurately by the tool itself. The adventurous types or people who are well versed in MySQL can tweak the type matching, although a warning message in red asks the former to think twice before messing with the default settings, and the latter are not very likely to use MyAccess in the first place.

MyAccess can be a godsend to a probably small number of Web developers, webmasters, and  IT sherpas who were weaned on Windows and Microsoft tools and now - for one reason or another - are making their feet wet in the Linux - OpenSource river. It is one of these very useful tools that try to make the transition as painless as possible. It isn't, however, all milk and honey: MyAccess 1.4 still has a number of relatively benign but annoying bugs; it requires prior installation and setup of MyODBC driver; setting up MyODBC and MyAccess is not extremely difficult, but it isn't intuitive, either; lastly, MyAccess is available for either MS Access 97 and 2000 but only under Windows. Nonetheless I consider myself lucky that I found it.

MyAccess (click on thumbnail):
Opening MySQL table 
Design view

For more information please visit MyAccess site.

Online reading:

Online Community Report

The Online Community Report is a free twice-monthly e-mail and Web newsletter covering current events and trends in online communities.  Each issue contains one or two original feature articles plus collection of news, resources, job postings, and articles from other sites. It focuses primarily on tools for community building and online communities by and for the commercial sector, but some of this information is highly relevant to nonprofits as well. The Report is edited by Dan Shafer and Jim Cashel.

Conference:

Distance Learning 2001
  • 17th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning
  • Held August 8-10, 2001 in Madison, WI
  • The Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning provides a forum for the exchange of information on distance education and training. The conference addresses the needs of educators, trainers, managers and designers from throughout the world who are involved in the application of technology to the teaching and learning process and in the planning, administration and management of distance education programs. The conference emphasizes:
    • Practical "how to" guidelines and techniques to enhance distance teaching, learning, and course design (for audio, video, print, computer and other media).
    • Best practices that demonstrate effective management, instructor training, and learner support services.
    • Successful solutions, innovations or research that address important problems or barriers with proven results.
    • New developments and trends in distance education and global learning.
P.S. Yours truly will present at this conference a session entitled "Team-teaching and Team-learning on a Global Scale".

She said, he said:

"Machines should work. People should think." -- Thomas J. Watson


© 2001 Vlad Wielbut and the Alliance for Community Technology