Hi all,
I'm not overly familiar with the terminology and processes of Access, but am using Access 2003 as a means of working on a project which involves a lot of data (currently 400,000 entries across 50 fields). My colleague and I wish to pare this data down in order to get clear about what we require from the database before handing it over to a professional developer for the next stage of our project (including the normalisation process), which will involve other people being able to query and add to the data through a front-end on a website (our interest lies in the subject of the data itself, rather than the in-depth technical workings of the database).
In order to share the database more efficiently and safely, we hoped to share the data online - thus I split the database, moving the main table and look-up tables to a back-end (our web host) and trying to link to these tables from the front-end. I've been using the Linking Tables wizard to try to achieve this but am unsure what file path to use in order for Access to link to the back-end. Using the direct url to the file where the tables are saved on the host, I can see that Access manages to link to the server but then tells me that this is an invalid file path (obviously, as it's linking to a file rather than to the actual tables?).
My questions:
1) is this even the best way to do this at this point, considering we're using Access 2003 and have no desire to upgrade just before moving our project forward;
2) if we are doing this in the correct manner, is there a simple answer to linking the tables? I'm hoping someone can tell me "Your file path needs to be ______"!
Many thanks in advance
I'm not overly familiar with the terminology and processes of Access, but am using Access 2003 as a means of working on a project which involves a lot of data (currently 400,000 entries across 50 fields). My colleague and I wish to pare this data down in order to get clear about what we require from the database before handing it over to a professional developer for the next stage of our project (including the normalisation process), which will involve other people being able to query and add to the data through a front-end on a website (our interest lies in the subject of the data itself, rather than the in-depth technical workings of the database).
In order to share the database more efficiently and safely, we hoped to share the data online - thus I split the database, moving the main table and look-up tables to a back-end (our web host) and trying to link to these tables from the front-end. I've been using the Linking Tables wizard to try to achieve this but am unsure what file path to use in order for Access to link to the back-end. Using the direct url to the file where the tables are saved on the host, I can see that Access manages to link to the server but then tells me that this is an invalid file path (obviously, as it's linking to a file rather than to the actual tables?).
My questions:
1) is this even the best way to do this at this point, considering we're using Access 2003 and have no desire to upgrade just before moving our project forward;
2) if we are doing this in the correct manner, is there a simple answer to linking the tables? I'm hoping someone can tell me "Your file path needs to be ______"!
Many thanks in advance