I am planning on creating a large database to be used for a long time. It will need the ability to be flexible and highly sortable to the manor similar to the filters in MS Access. I have never worked with Flex Grids, SQL Server Databases or anything similar in VB. Can you make some points and counter points twoards wich direction I shoud look. I know very little about, or even all the options available to me. The differences and benifits between them would be appreciated.
Thanks Pradeep1210, you posted the answer to my question right while I was posting it. Can you tell me a little more about SQL Server databases and do you know of any program out there to edit and work with them ?
I ended up finding something nice called navicat - www.navicat.com/ . However now it's asking me to connect to my SQL database. Is there anyways I can just make my computer the database so that way I can start working on it ? Just wondering if I could do that, or I need to find a sql server somewhere.
That looks like it is for MySQL, which is not the same as SQL Server. You can use SQL Server databases from VB without actually having SQL Server on your machine. This will show you how to connect to MySQL from VB.
SQL Server comes with its own tools (enterprise manager) to create and manage the database.
When you say "big database" - what sort of size are you thinking of? If less than 4GB then you should look at MSDE (it's a free cut down version of SQL server from Microsoft).
You don't need anything. You can create the db in Access, and then open it up in VB, using SQL commands to query it. Look at this example. It has a database that you can edit with Access, or with the app.
The nice thing about using SQL is that it tends to make your code portable. The worst thing about it is Microsoft's adoption of the name SQL for their database, SQL Server. That confuses people. SQL is a language that's used to access many databases from Access to MySQL to SQL Server to Oracle. And others. Like most cross-platform languages each platform uses its own super/subset of SQL but if you stick with the ANSI standard then it's usually pretty easy to change the database/back end without rewriting your code. (Since the ANSI standard is sort of a 'lowest common denominator' sticking with it sometimes complicates your code. You need to judge how much of a tradeoff you're willing to make for portability.)
I've done this a couple of times, writing a VB program that runs against an Oracle database and then changing it to run against a SQL Server database. In one case the *only* thing I needed to change was the connection string. In the other case I found that I had actually used some Oracle-specific 'SQL' language & had to rewrite those. But both programs are now standard & I have great hopes that they will now run unchanged (except for the connection string) against any SQL database we choose to use for the back end.
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