Access vs WebFOCUS

S

Stephen

Our company has a large mainframe database, and the decision has been made to
pull down some information to DB2 files, to make the information more
available to end users like me. Two choices are being considered to access
this data. Access via ODBC connection to the DB2 files, and WebFOCUS, by
Information Builders. I have years of user level experience with Access,
using it as a front end to mainframe data, pulled into Access via text files.
I have only seen a demonstration of WebFOCUS, and I am not impressed. But,
I do not have enough knowledge of the two products to compare them. Frankly,
I am looking for simple management understandable reasons why Access is a
better choice. I have a few concerns that I see.
WebFOCUS appears to be only a report writer, no capability to write data to
a table?
I do not see any capability to write code similar to Visual Basic?
How much support is available in the community?

Can you guys comment on these concerns, add to the list, and direct me to
further reading that can help me in my quest for the truth?
By the way, you helped me in a similar situation about 2 years ago, when the
fad was Lotus Notes Database.
 
G

G. Vaught

I did a quick read up on WebFocus and it does just seem like a glorified
reporting application, where you can create queries against existing data,
but you can't insert or change data. If you just need to extract and
manipulate data into various formats, then this probably would not be a bad
choice. You may want to look on the Internet for any pros and cons with this
program. I did see where FedEx uses WebFocus, so it must be a fairly good
product.

http://www.informationbuilders.com/products/webfocus/development.html

If you need the capability to modify or insert data, then I think Access
will be your choice. However, depending on the number of concurrent users,
Access may not be your best choice to store this information to use against
a web page. You would need a direct link to DB2 to support many users. I
think, over the Internet/Intranet Access would safely support 50 concurrent
users without too much trouble. However, be aware older versions of Access
had a tendency to crash. I have not used 2002/2003 over the web, but have
used 2000. 2000 seems to support a fair amout of users (100+ transactions,
not necessarily concurrent) without any problems.
 
S

Stephen

I have done the quick read on the web as well. I have also used the product
just enough to know that you can create queries using multiple tables, with
functions similar to Access. We have also linked Access to the DB2 files
through an ODBC driver. We have had a few problems, but I think it will
work. At this point I think that is the way to go. I think one of the
claims to fame of WebFOCUS is the use of a web browser (intenet explorer in
our case). I guess that is called thin client? I do not see the advantage!
The performance of the queries is not good, and we already have Office loaded
on most computers in the building. We would never have over 50 users from
our building, but it is likely that over 50 users could access the DB2 data
 
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