[ale] Using perl/cgi against access tables

[Wandered Inn]

Somewhere below, I do bring this back on topic for the list....

"Gary S. Mackay" wrote:
> 
> Yes. My client has an existing web site sitting on an NT server. The ISP told
> me he supports both Access and MS SQL. For the simple, probably single table,
> addition, I'd rather use Access and not bother with MSSQL for now. I do not
> want to have to contact the ISP everytime I add/delete tables so he can update
> the DSN's. I'm sure there is a way to get a web page to communicate to the
> access table(s) via perl/cgi by doing some sort of DSN-less connection or
> something.
>         I do not have access (no pun intended!) to the server at the ISP, so whatever
> solution I come up with must be something that I can just create and ftp over
> to the site.

First of all, I'm no expert on Access.  As I understand it, it is not
designed for multiple user access.  So, if you plan on the possibility
of more than one person updating this info at once, then you should
probably look at MS sql.  If not, then access will probably work.  As
noted in my earlier posting perl dbi/dbd/odbc will do what you want to
do.

Server access is an entirely different issue.  You would either have to
have ftp access to the cgi directory of the server or the ISP would have
to move your code into place once you ftped to their server.  Most ISP's
are probably not going to provide ftp access to their cgi directory
tree.  On NT, you will probably want to go with

In order to attempt to keep this subject on topic, might this be an
opportunity for you to suggest your ISP place a low end Linux server on
their network, running any one of the free db engines and apache?  Point
is, if this machine is dedicated to your customer, they might not have a
problem with providing extensive access to the server.  Depending on the
size of the database and your customer needs, you could probably get by
with a Pentium class machine, particularily if the services on the
server were limited to just this client, or possibly just the database
needs.

My personal experiences with NT as a web server have not been pleasant. 
Before anyone jumps up to disagree, I would suggest that
NT/IIS/perl/Access is not going to perform as well as
Linux/Apache/perl/mod_perl/mysql on the same hardware.  Remote access
issues are a lot easier to deal with on Linux then they are on NT.

--
Until later: Geoffrey		esoteric at denali.atlnet.com

Microsoft != Innovation
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