or use Perl, which is much faster, free & easy to learn.
Main Topics
Browse All Topics
Loading Advertisement...
Question
What programing language would be best to run a daily search of a database and generate an auto email of results?
I have a database that I can use from access or from SQL. I would like to create a program that lets me store names and search criteria for each person and then run those searches daily or weekly and send an email of the search results to each individual. Since I have been out of programming for a long long time, which language would best fit these needs? Any additional tips would be greatly appreciated.
Vann
This Question has been solved and asker verified All Experts Exchange premium technology solutions are available to subscription members.
Subscribe now for full access to Experts Exchange and get
Instant Access to this Solution
- Plus...
- 30 Day FREE access, no risk, no obligation
- Collaborate with the world's top tech experts
- Unlimited access to our exclusive solution database
- Never be left without tech help again
Trusted by hundreds of thousands everyday for fast, accurate and reliable tech support.
- "The time we save is the biggest benefit of Experts Exchange to Warner Bros. What could take multiple guys 2 hours or more each to find is accessed in around 15 minutes on Experts Exchange." Mike Kapnisakis, Warner Bros.
- "Our team likes having a resource that is more secure than just using Google and most experts using this service really know their stuff. It's nice to look here first versus using Google." Dayna Sellner, Lockheed Martin
- "Anytime that I've been stumped with a problem, 9 out of 10 times Experts Exchange has either the accepted solution or an open discussion of the potential solution to the problem." Kenny Red, eBay Inc.
See what Experts Exchange can do for you.
Got a question?
We've got the answer.
Experts Exchange has been collecting answers to technology questions since 1996…3 million and counting! If you have a question, chances are we already have your answer.
Need individual assistance?
Our experts are ready to help.
If you can't find the exact answer you're looking for, ask our exclusive community of 50,000 experts. You’ll get a personalized answer from a trusted professional.
Want to learn from the best?
Read articles from industry experts.
Thousands of free tech tips, tricks, how-to’s and tutorials are available in our peer reviewed articles section. See for yourself how smart our experts are, no login required.
Working on a long term project?
Store your work and research.
Save solutions to your questions, answers you’ve discovered through searching plus helpful articles in your personal knowledgebase for easy future access.
Access the answers to your technology questions today.
30-day free trial. Register in 60 seconds.
What Makes Experts Exchange Unique?
Members of the expert community talk about why the experience at Experts Exchange is different than what you will find anywhere else.
Trusted by the world's most respected brands.
Faithfully serving IT professionals since 1996.
Try it out and discover for yourself.
30-day free trial. Register in 60 seconds.
Free Tech Articles
-
WARNING: 5 Reasons why you should NEVER fix a computer for free.
It is in our nature to love the puzzle. We are obsessed. The lot of us. We love puzzles. We love the challenge. We thrive on finding the answer. We hate disarray. It bothers us deep in our soul. W...
-
SCCM OSD Basic troubleshooting
SCCM 2007 OSD is a fantastic way to deploy operating systems, however, like most things SCCM issues can sometimes be difficult to resolve due to the sheer volume of logs to sift through and the dispe...
-
Migrate Small Business Server 2003 to Exchange 2010 and Windows 2008 R2
This guide is intended to provide step by step instructions on how to migrate from Small Business Server 2003 to Windows 2008 R2 with Exchange 2010. For this migration to work you will need the fo...
-
Create a Win7 Gadget
This article shows you how to create a simple "Gadget" -- a sort of mini-application supported by Windows 7 and Vista. Gadgets can be dropped anywhere on the desktop to provide instant information, ...
-
Outlook continually prompting for username and password
There have been a lot of questions recently regarding Outlook prompting for a username and password whilst using Exchange 2007. There are a few reasons why this would happen and I will try to cover t...
-
Backup Exchange 2010 Information Store using Windows Backup
There seems to be quite a lot of confusion around the ability to backup Exchange 2010 using the built in Windows Backup feature. This stems from the omission of this feature prior to Exchange 2007 s...
Cloud Class Webinars
- Avoiding Bugs in Microsoft Access
Alison Balter takes and in-depth look at avoiding bugs in Access. In this webinar you will learn about using the immediate window to debug your applications, invoking the debugger, using breakpoints to troubleshoot, stepping through code, setting the next statement to execute, ...
- Top 10 Best New Features in Visio 2010
Scott Helmers gives live demonstrations of the top 10 new features in Visio 2010. This webinar will teach you how to create compelling diagrams by adding shapes to the page with a single click, linking the shapes in a diagram to data in Excel (or SQL Server, or SharePoint), ...
- IT Consultant Business Secrets Revealed
Michael Munger, Experts Exchange tech pro and IT consultant, pulls back the curtain on his very successful businesses and answers question on every IT consultant and business owner should know about. He shares secrets on what he did to solve the 5 most common problems in IT, ...
- Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
Quest CTO, Mike Billon, gives an overview of the steps involved in building a dunamic disaster recovery plan. Through case studies and an examination of software/hardware tooles for monitoring and testing, you'll gain a better understandin of where you are, where you want ...
- Organize Your Visio Diagrams with Containers and Lists
Scott Helmers uses cross functional flowcharts, wireframe diagrams, data graphic legends and seating charts to teach you: how to ustilize all three new structured diagram components in Visio 2010, the best practices for organizeing shapes in previous version of Visio, how to organize ...
- How to Us Objects, Properties, Events and Methods in Microsoft Access
Alison Dalter gives an in-depbth look at objects, properties, events and methods in Microsoft Access. In this webinar you will learn about using the object browser, referring to objects, working with properties and methods, working with object variables, understanding the ...
Join the Community
Give a Little. Get a Lot.
Join the community of experts here and help other tech pros by answering question in your area of expertise. You can earn FREE access to all Experts Exchange's premium features and resources.
Answers
On linux machines I use mysql and perl for this.
and on windowss i use mysql and VB6 + MyVBQL (a mysql lib thats much more stable than odbc) download from http://www.icarz.com/mysql
I have about 30 of this running on difrent companies to do exactly what you describe.
Depending on the numbers of records or size of the reports that you are going to be emailing out you may want to consider going with ASP or PHP and a web server. If the number of records was large you can email people a link where they can view all the records within their given data set.
You can also set up jobs in SQL Server to auto-email people if certain criteria have been met on queries that you execute via a job on a schedule.
This would be my first plan of attack anyway.
Good Luck
I don't really know how to say this without putting in the extras. I have SQL and I have Access. In the beginning Access has a level of comfort because I have used it and is currently where the data is located. However, long term I am going to have to go to SQL because of the next two steps that I am going to have to take. This question is revolving around getting the short tem solution and then direction for the long term fix. All of the previous answers are valid and I have changed my mind on which is best several times. I was thinking Access because I am not having to learn two different programs at once for the short term and I would like to get it working as quickly as possible. But, putting the data from access to SQL is not that hard and having a scheduled job run in SQL is the ticket. Do any of the other options allow a scheduled solution or do we have to manually run the programs ourselves? Also getting this web based to where users can change their selections themselves is a good feature. With that added comment is there anything else any of you would like to add for this first part of my project? Thank you alot for taking time to give me some ideas.
Vann
Don't be afraid of the switch from Access to SQL server. If you are good with Access I think you will find many things in SQL Server that are familiar, after all the same company made both.
I am not sure about automating the running of scripts via Access, perhaps it is possible im not sure. If you really need to implement it that way (and it is not possible to schedule things via Access) I would look into Windows scheduler. Basically, Windows scheduler will open a program at a given time/schedule, it's an inherent feature of Windows. If you had a program that would auto-execute upon being opened you could schedule this program to open via Windows scheduler.
However, I would really push to putting your data on SQL Server if you know you are going to have to.
Some thing's to think about....
Are you getting close to the 2 GB limit of the Access file?
Do you need many users to be able to access the data at the same time?
If you hold off and move it to SQL Server later will there be more data and more potential problems with the x-fer?
Good Luck!
Hi Vann,
We all have to go on learning curves, but frequently its best to use our existing skills. You mentioned that you have done programming in the past, what languages, whats your strongest language ..?
If possible go back to your roots, which database you choose depends upon many factors. If your application is going to be used by many users at the same time (over 10) then go with an edition of SQL Server.
If the number of users will always be less than 10 and the size of the database is unlikely to reach 2GB of disk space then go with Access 2000/2003.
Win32 Application
=========
VB Pro 6.0 with Access/SQL Server (for rapid development, lots of support material on the web)
Web Based
========
PHP or ASP with either Access or SQL Server back-end (again lots of support on the web).
Give me some more technical background,
VBEllis-rdy
All answers are valid and require points. Thanks to all of you. I am going to look at PHP and ASP with SQL. Is there a reason to lean either way since I know nothing about either of them? I am going to also get access VBA and look at Pearl. I thank all of you. I might be biting off more than I can chew if I look at all of them, but I need a one month working on it part time solution first, then I can go on. Thanks again.
VBEllis-rdy added a comment why I was stuck on what I was stating before. So I never saw his comment before posting mine. I am 10 or 15 years out of programming. I knew Basic, Visual Basic, Fortran, and Assembly. I understand how it works, but even though I am only 37 I feel like I am 80 in programming years. Old and forgotten.
For the next four months it will be only me in the database, but in the future it has to be integrated into a webpage and I would like 100 people or more to be able to change their preferences at once if need be. Long term it has to be PHP or ASP and SQL. Not a doubt in my mind now. Don't know the advantage of either one though. For getting up in the next month in as little time as possible I believe it is VB and access. Does that sound correct to everyone?
As Navicerts was unsure of it, I figured I'd let you know that you can, in fact, set Access up to automatically run something like this via windows scheduled tasks.
However, I really dislike Access's emailing capabilities. It can be really tricky to set it up in such a way as to get around windows security of having to physically click OK for every sent email - no fun at all.
A couple of people have mentioned perl, but let me throw Python out there as another scripting language you might want to look at. It's a LOT more user-friendly (or at least human-readable) than perl, has a lot of free code out there you can grab and modify to your needs, and the learning curve isn't bad at all if you've written code before. If you know the database queries you want to write and have much of the DB already together, you could probably set something like what you want up in under 10-15 hours, then set it up as a scheduled task.
As far as php vs. asp - if you're comfortable with Visual Basic you'll be better off with ASP - reasons for PHP are generally the fact that the hardware/software is much cheaper (no windows/SQL server/IIS licenses to purchase). If you're going to do PHP you're better off on a linux server (LAMP - Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP is a very common term for this sort of setup), if you're going to do ASP you have to use a windows server.
Didn't understand your post until I just did some research on Access FE and Access/SQL BE. After reading another article in here that makes perfect sense. I can do Access FE with Access BE and then switch BE to SQL and then keep using the Access FE until the SQL stored procedure is built and ready. I will close this question when I get home this evening. I really do appreciate the interest that I saw in my question today and it strengthens my belief in what this website can offer when it is used like it is supposed to be. Thank you ALL!!!!!!!
hi vann,
sorry for the delay .. I dont think personally the development IDE (VBA) within access to be very good. If I was going to use an application FE I would definately develop that in Visual Basic Pro. Although these days, more and more web based systems are being used like applications.
It sounds like your product would be best suited as being web based, I would not use ASP. PHP is being developed by the open source community, its not limited to Microsoft developers. Its being developed by some of the best coders on the planet! You often see PHP FE with MySQL BE, again both are open source.
PHP can be used with Access or SQL Server and MySQL (amongst others). Think to rememebr is that Access is just a client database tool .. SQL Server/MySQL are server based technologies, designed to be scaleable to millions of users.
Its your choice in the end ;-), it took me around 1 month to learn the basics of PHP and produce a FE with SQL BE.
Good luck.
There was no way to divide these points correctly. Lots of people had great ideas. Some were a little more informative than others, but all of them had merrit. I do appreciate you all for what you have done and I hope no one is offended. Thanks all. Most likely I will be back in a little bit with more specific questions, but right now it is time to find so code. HAHA
3 Ways to Join
Business Accounts
- Perfect for organizations
- Multiple users
- Save over 36%
- Create a Business Account
Answer for Membership
- Earn free access
- Showcase your knowledge
- No credit card required
- Sign Up to Answer
Loading Advertisement...
by: dmitryz6Posted on 2006-03-02 at 20:06:44ID: 16091738
I believe easiest and cheapest way to go use Access VBA .You will need less time and knowledge to create this interface, and if you are going to use Access Database as well. Only question if you are going to use Access as Back End, you need to know size limits as well, but for interface Access VBA.If you are owning Access you don’t need new licenses .If you like to do it as multi-user interface you can supply Run time version as well.