Re: Oracle - MS Access - Does your company have a policy about local vs. centralized data storage? (Perhaps a bit off topic?)

On 7/4/07, Ken Naim <kennaim_at_gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> One of the first datamarts, originally built using SAS, found a reporting
> issue that correct a several basis point error that had been accumulation
> over the 14 year history of the company and added $6 million to the bottom
> line for that year; paying for the warehouse project for that and many
> years
> to come.

Nice ROI!

BTW, some of you may recall reading a report a few years ago where researchers
had examined the Excel files of corporate "Power Users" and found significant financial
errors in the majority of them.

Excel and Access are used by the same kinds of folks, so expect the same kinds of errors.

As for centralization, I "Inherited" a couple of Access apps when one of our App admins left.

These "apps" required a somewhat complex series of steps to generate a report. Doing it
manually required at least 2 hours.

Being possessed of at least one of the virtues of a good programmer, that being laziness, I
quickly decided I would not be doing this more than once.

http://www.hhhh.org/wiml/virtues.html

Several MV's and one view later, it was automated. The all Oracle solution also gets slightly
different results than the Access solution. Hmmm...

-- 
Jared Still
Certifiable Oracle DBA and Part Time Perl Evangelist

--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l