An interesting MS SQL/PHP environment

One of the projects I work on is for a company in London who have a MS SQL server based system.

Historically we’ve used Access 2000 and it’s report writing abilities to write custom reports and programs but it’s an absolute pig and doesn’t give you enough control with out years of VBA knowledge.

So, In an attempt to reuse our existing codebase and staff expertise we decided to start using PHP/HTML and bring them into the 21st century by offering an intranet approach to their systems.

This has unsuprisingly caused us a number of headaches…

Firstly the change over from one to the other cannot be automated in anyway whatsoever. This is a bt of a ballache but we’re happy to invest the extra time as in the longrun it will save us time and allow us to use our existing expertise developing PHP systems for the Web.

Secondly, Printing. This is a big one as there is crap all support for CSS features like line-break in any of the major browsers except Opera and the client wasn’t interested in upgrading their browsing experience :)

Thirdly, storing of temporary data and non internal system data.

Basically our clients are unable to write to the MS SQL server as it is forbidden by the terms of their contract with their software supplier.

As a result we needed some way of storing local data and creating stored procedures of somekind.

The answer… MS Access again! We’re using an MS Access datafile as our aggregator to the MS SQL server and it also allows us to store local data in it’s Jet Database along with a bunch of queries that pull together our commonly used SELECT statements. eg Adding the Ethnic Origin to a tenancy file.

So, I’ll let you know how I get on with my list of issues!

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