Month: April 2017

MS Access front end – MS SQL Azure back end Link to Configuration Set UP FMS Group

This is an excellent article on linking MS Access to SQL Azure – which is just great if you are wanting to use your VBA skills direct on your SQL Database.

FMS Professional Solutions Group – Luke Chung MVP article

It should be noted that the Primary Key will need to be set to Integer in the SQL Database rather than Big Int otherwise it will appear as #DELETED# when you go in and view the data. This may not be an issue going forward for some users of Office 365 Access 2016 as Microsoft are introducing support for Big Int in MS Access. Congratulations to Microsoft on that small but important change.

MS Access VBA Function – create UID starting at prescribed number

Useful function if you are taking two tables with overlapping identity key to be placed in a table that will have a further child record and you wish to separate the new keys. 

Public Function WriteUID(LCounter As Long) As Long
 
Dim rstC As DAO.Recordset
Dim LCountStart As Double
 
LCountStart = LCounter
 
Set rstC = CurrentDb.OpenRecordset("TABLEREQUIRINGUNIQUEID")
 
Do Until rstC.EOF = True
 
rstC.Edit
rstC!UID = LCounter
rstC.Update
 
LCounter = LCounter + 1
 
rstC.MoveNext
 
Loop

MsgBox "Finished UNIQUEID write"
 
End Function

Linking to SQL Server / Oracle – don’t skip the set key field on linking

After writing Update queries with multiple joins on linked Oracle Databases I was receiving an error on running particular update queries on linked tables that had no Primary Key identified.
On linking the tables I had been asked to identify a field with a unique value. Not thinking I had passed on this and initially this didn’t seem to be an issue. Subsequently I identified that the error associated with the update queries originated from this lack of key identification. Re-linking required tables and ensuring that I identified a unique key allowed for these queries to be processed. This of course is because Access is wanting to use the unique key to identify the field for update.

The message

Operation must use an updateable query.

Just one to be mindful of if you are linking to enterprise grade backend databases.

MS Access VBA Function – Loop through Query Objects and write SQL to Table

Continuing the theme of tools that assist the use of MS Access as a platform for transferring data between systems. Here is a small function that will allow you to write the pure SQL syntax of all queries in a database to a table. I personally used this in a system transfer project. The business had given us something called a field mapping plan that identified the table and fields in one system and where they were to be migrated in the other system. Having written the queries I then wanted to go back through and reconcile the original mapping to the SQL to ensure that absolutely every field had been taken across. Writing the SQL into a table allows for table and field combinations to be methodically searched. Quite useful.

Create a table called T001SQLCollection with at least 2 fields – QueryName and SQL. This is where the recordset writes the SQL to.

This is very much a reverse of the previous post function.

Public Function ListQueries()
 
Dim rstList As DAO.Recordset
 
    Dim i As Integer
        For i = 0 To CurrentDb.QueryDefs.Count - 1
        Set rstList = CurrentDb.OpenRecordset("T001SQLCollection")
        With rstList
            .AddNew
            rstList!QueryName = CurrentDb.QueryDefs(i).Name
            rstList!SQL = CurrentDb.QueryDefs(i).SQL
            rstList.Update
        End With
    Next i
   
    rstList.Close   
 
MsgBox "Finished"
 
End Function