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A number of years ago I was in the Navy and worked in an electronics shop on an aircraft carrier. We were responsible for calibrating and repairing all the test
by jotakami 7y ago
A number of years ago I was in the Navy and worked in an electronics shop on an aircraft carrier. We were responsible for calibrating and repairing all the test and measurement equipment for the entire ship as well as the squadrons that we carried with us. Easily over 10k individual pieces of equipment, each of which had to be calibrated on a specific schedule. Most of this data was managed centrally, and we sent/received DB updates a couple times a week. However, just managing our workload and operations efficiently required other data which was not part of this database. I had no choice but to build my own solution, and the only real option was MS Access given the barren IT resources available on a deployed aircraft carrier.
But man, was it a fucking lifesaver. Just for one example, we often had to send equipment out to different labs since we didn’t have the capability to test them, and shipping stuff required a standard military shipping document with various mundane pieces of information about the stuff being sent. Creating these documents was a tedious process of looking up the data manually and then typing it into a Word file. I just recreated the document as an Access form, with fields that would populate from a query. Creating the shipping documents went from 30-45 mins to essentially the click of a single button.
- drblast 7y agoHuh, similar story here. The nuclear department on my carrier needed to produce this monthly report for training hours that would take them a ton of manual effort. There was no budget at all for any kind of automation but Access was on every machine. I know what I'm doing with databases. I never want to use Access if I don't have to. But it has the enviable property of "no server administration required" which meant that we could backup the DB to a shared drive and people after me could modify the thing without being a DBA. The amount of time that database saved really is mind-boggling.
- mycall 7y agoFun getting everyone to close their MSAccess processes so you can do some changes to the MDB.
- kwhitefoot 7y agoI partially fixed that by splitting the mdb into a front end and a back end where the back end was only tables (no UI, no queries) and launching the front end mdb from a simple command script that copied it to the users tmp directory first. Then at least I could fix bugs in the UI and after a while that's where most of the bugs were.
- onefuncman 7y agohuh, i just posted before i saw this comment that I never saw anyone plan out their access database like this, kudos
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y agoI wonder if sqlite could become this in the future.
- jdfellow 7y agoI wonder how much effort it would take to build a desktop application providing a similar user experience to Access, using SQLite.
- krilly 7y agoOpen/LibreOffice Base does have backends for MySQL and PostgreSQL already
- _AzMoo 7y agoWhy would you do that though? The underlying database technology is not really one of the problems access has.
- allannienhuis 7y agocross-platform might be one reason.
- onefuncman 7y agoSure it is ... the database underlying Access uses JetSQL which has its own fun syntactic quirks It's also very bad at concurrent users if you do go down the path of dropping it on a network share if it's a normalized schema, since there's no server to cache queries or do optimizations... for strictly data entry against a simple schema you can maybe push it to low 100s of users, but backing up / restoring / rolling out new versions is a nightmare when the frontend and backend are commingled like that. You can deploy different versions of .mdbs if you have an external backend, though I've never seen anyone do so with an Access database backing an Access "UI" project...
- dlhavema 7y agoMy first real programming job was a summer project for a tutoring program at ASU where they managed their schedules in a shared access database. It got bad as it would get overwritten often. 10 students would show up with no tutor, or a tutor would sit and wiat for students who would never come cause they rescheduled. We copied the structure to SQL server, built some stored procs ( only allowed way to access the DB at the time ) and fronted it with a bunch of aspx pages. They loved it beyond my expectations. All of that was new learning as I had only ever done the LAMP stack at that time and this was all Microsoft stuff.
- AcerbicZero 7y agoThats hilarious. I did something similar with comms equipment on my first deployment to Iraq, because as a lowly little E-3 I wasn't going to let some $80k piece gear I signed for disappear, and then pay for myself (although that was extremely unlikely anyway). It ended up being useful enough that some folks up at division copied it and used it for tracking all of the laptops they were signing out, along with the paperwork, which you can't escape regardless of where you are.
- bob1029 7y agoBeing able to automate forms can absolutely revolutionize some businesses. Many business owners have no idea the extent to which automation is feasible here. I have seen fully manual paper process (printers/scanners/pen & ink/shredders/etc.) go into 100% digital realm and the impact it had on the business. It really is incredible the difference it makes. The most interesting factor was the fact that now that the inputs are captured in a computer, we can run business rules against those inputs computationally. I.e., prevent generation of forms you would have to otherwise manually revise and resubmit after the fact. Then someone figured out you could start plugging in other business systems to your rules engine and tracking state... I think it is a fun and compelling challenge to see just how much of the business you can put "on rails" with computers and various integrations. I have some background in semiconductor manufacturing, and the degree of automation I witnessed there got to me in a really deep way. Experiencing a massive factory that can literally run for hours-to-days without a single human inside is something else. I feel a lot of businesses can strive towards similar goals. Being able to fully-automate manufacturing of silicon chips is an incredibly opulent affair, but if you can simply automate a paper-bound business process that is on a hot-path (I.e. used many times a day), it could potentially save a struggling business.
- selestify 7y agoHow frequent was actual human intervention required? Every few hours?
- bob1029 7y agoDepends on lots of factors. Most maintenance is preventative in that context, so its hard to pin down a specific thing that would break down first or how long it would take. If something does break unexpectedly its usually treated as a big deal every time so it never happens again.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- hamstrungtw19 7y ago> Being able to fully-automate manufacturing of silicon chips is an incredibly opulent affair, but if you can simply automate a paper-bound business process that is on a hot-path (I.e. used many times a day), it could potentially save a struggling business. That's funny. I work at a very large fab, and of all the places I've worked, this is the one that's most in need of the sort of in-office hot path optimizations you mention, and doubly worse is that it's the least susceptible to allowing someone to do anything about it. (In fact, it's regressing. This month saw a fab-wide rollout of a document management system that has caused a ~10x increase in wall clock time for attaching files to emails or through forms on the intranet. Now consider what that means when the company exhibits a pathological form of the passing-MS-Office-documents-around-to-each-other mindset...)
- smitty1e 7y agoMy first serious effort to program (Access97) was an automated engineering log in Access that extracted my operating hours for the month and wrote them out in MS Word as a draft Navy message. It really didn't have much in the way of error checking to ensure that the state of the equipment was consistent i.e., you didn't start a generator or main engine twice in a row. Which became crucial when I handed my baby over to the FNG at transfer time, and went on house-hunting orders. Came back, ran the report, and he'd gooned the data so bad that we ran our equipment for negative time. Which was an outstanding business opportunity! Run the hours off of the equipment! Yes! We can name our price for this device! Other than the part where time doesn't exactly work that way, the idea was great.
- bdavis__ 7y agoIn the AF we called it PMEL. My anecdote is getting a 9 track tape of all of the test equipment part numbers and calibration intervals (TO-1-1-100 , maybe?). transfer the tape to a disk file, sort it and use binary search. a couple of years before ms access, but turbo pascal was king !
- notadev 7y agoIf the calibrations were on a schedule, shouldn't Sked have handled that? I was in the Navy as well. I've made countless databases, batch files, and VBScript just to automate and streamline tasking that the Navy refused to let you use non-gov tools like web apps and whatnot. I even created a fully finctioning VTC scheduling web application running on IIS and using classic ASP with a bootstrap/jQuery front-end for one of the bigger numbered fleets. This was in 2016. When they are all you reallly have, you can do wonders with the MS Office suite.
- jotakami 7y agoYou’ll understand when I say this: our lab was part of AIMD, so we were governed by NAVAIR instructions. Sked was for shipboard maintenance, but we technically weren’t performing “shipboard” maintenance so we didn’t use it.