QUESTION POSED ON: 01 March 2002
I have developed an inventory control application in MS Access & VBA that has been instrumental in saving my company $6 million so far, with at least another $4 million to 5 million over the next 18 months. We are a processing plant and part of a global group of mining companies. My tool has sparked interest across the group and I am about to release an evaluation copy to other sites. Our corporation is in the process of aggressively standardizing on SAP (and I extract the data from our SAP system)with Oracle of various flavors being the underlying DB as far as I can tell.
Access is a superb prototyping tool and an excellent stand-alone platform, however, I am considering something rather more professional. For example, to generate the statistical data for 23,000 items with 50 months consumption in VBA takes about 45 minutes, tests indicate the same can be done in C++ in under a minute, and the last time I used PL/SQL to calculate Single Exponentially Smoothed Forecasts for the same data set, it was done in a matter of seconds.
I have a little Oracle knowledge and have Oracle Enterprise Edition Release 2 V8.1.6 on my home machine, I had been studying for certification but dropped it in favour of a B.Comp Sc which I have commenced this year. And now to the question.
What would be the best way to proceed? Learn enough PL/SQL to write the statistical and forecasting engine and use Java to develop a front end? Or C++ and Java? Or Access and ODBC? All of this of course would depend on me convincing our corporate IT department to let me write an application that digs under SAP, (I know when I first asked for access to SQLplus to get to our data under SAP it felt like I had offered to buy the IT managers daughter).
Looking forward to hearing what real Developers/Analysts would do (I am but a humble storeman).
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