adiaz01

First of all. Is this a big project? It's going to last more than a year? if the answer is yes. Please don't use Access.Now. You want to create a webpage and save information and also the users can come back anytime and update the information.if you're good programming on the web and the plataform for you company is microsoft you can use Frontpage with IIS and MS SQL server using ASP as code is like VisualBasic.If don't know how to do this you can use FileMaker Pro, is like Access but more robust and it can create webpages on the fly with the ability of updates and reports; it's pretty cool. a little bit expensive but It worth it. you don't need to know a lot of web programming or database programming at all. Hope this help!!

Just my opinion, if you're going to code for a network/company/clients that has Microsoft all over, with no doubt VB. if you're going to program for an internet audience with many different Operating Systems like Linux, Mac & Windows you will be safer with Java. You can't program in VB fo Mac or Linux anyway. A few facts: if you learn VB you can interact with Windows Script Host (like shells on linux) MS-SQL scripts (to create automated task inside SQL server) , Office Suite and IIS (the apache for windows). all of the previous used the same code, so you can cover a lot more territory and also most of the connections and libaries are built-in VB or shared as components. this is usefull when you interact with mortal users and Office Suite If you learn Java you can go wider but more complex programming and connections, I'm not very good with Java but every time I tried to used it (maybe becuase I interact more with windows applications) I've found that Java is more complex and longer. It really depends on what you need to do. Java was the Panacea years ago for interaction between plataforms and still is and now is OpenSource maybe somebody can do something to speed up the runtime process. Hope this help!!

Q: Does anyone know how to upload a file and form data to a server? Assumptions that I made by reading your question and comments. You have a server with PHP as a web script and you want to save a file from you users desktop/volume/share to the http server using an html form. if this is correct you have to go to http://www.tizag.com/phpT/fileupload.php I think this is what you looking for you can save information from a form to a database and upload a file to a server using PHP. Hope this help!!

As a mental jogging, please setup a perl script and try with a couple of thousend records in maybe 6 different text files, you will see the difficulty, specially when you include more than one user. Now if you really want to use text file try XML with Perl it'll work very good. But for large amount of data with more than one user I don't think you will find a better option than SQL server, the name does not matter to much for the concept, It'll matter on the price and the capacity.

Depends on the database you're using but most of them has a convertion function so you can convert from char to date, for example you can do in MS SQL "Select * from YourTableName where convert(char(10),DateAsVarcharInYourTable,101) = date()" or if you just need the last 10 records in you data you can also do "Select top 10 * from YourTableName order by convert(char(10),DateAsVarcharInYourTable,101) desc" in MySQL is a little bit more complicated, I can't remember the exact syntax but it will follow the same logic for the date translation, now why are you saving a date as varchar? just curious?

First question, Are you using PHP over Windows or Linux? if your answer is Windows, the best and easy way will be ODBC, but you reach the basic point if you can communicate with ODBC. now the drivers are propietary from Oracle so you need to install the comminication package first in order to enable ODBC, you can try by open Excell and make a Data>Get External Data>New Database Query and follow the wizard. Now if you can do this and you still can't connect using PHP the next question is Did you compile PHP including the Oracle Parameter? if not Voila that is the solution. you need to go back an recompile PHP including the Oracle driver for PHP . if your answer was Linux you need to get the drivers from Oracle to connect linux or the Client software from Oracle for Linux, and the recompile the PHP in order to get the connection with Oracle. There is a very good help on PHP.net about recompile and select the options you need to do this. Good Luck.

"but offers nothing that I don't have in MySQL already..."I like MySQL very much, but there are at least 2 things that MySQL does not have, the first and most important "I believe" is the graphical all-in-one interface with the whole system, MySQL doesn't have it (I know MyADMIN but is not as complete as MSSQL Console). the second is the integration with the rest of the programs, of course Office but also another database like Oracle, you can inter-communicate very easilly. the third one could be the support for replication and clustering is very powerfull basically because the simplicity.MSSQL is a great database as good as MySQL or Oracle, the downside is the name "Microsoft" but I think it works very good.