Database Starting Point

[CrowdedMill]

OK. I am a relatively new poster here on the forums, so speak up if I have placed this thread in the wrong section (or, if I am barking up the wrong tree entirely and I should take my meanderings elsewhere).

Background: I work at a company with about 100 employees. We are scattered across a wide area. We are only interconnected between locations by the cloud services supplied by the Google Apps that we pay for.

What I want to do is to create a database of company activity that can be added to by simple webforms and then queried by spreadsheets.

Employee #1 logs in to a web form every day and records, among other bits of data: How many widgets he made that day, how many man-hours it took, and comments about how well/badly the day was.

Employees #2-25 log in and enter similar but different data.
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Ideally, this data is stored in a cloud based database so I can then query it with some spreadsheets to manipulate the data coming out. I keep saying cloud based database because I don't have any on-site servers available and everyone is in different locations anyway and a VPN network would be spendy....

Manager #1 then wants to look at the data and see how many widgets Employees #1, 7 and 23 made yesterday.

Manager #2 wants to see how many widgets Employees #5-12 made.

Vice President #1 wants to see how many widgets everyone made divided by the number of man-hours it took to make them.
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So, my web hosting package comes with a few Access databases. Can I use Access to make the databases, InfoPath to make the forms to distribute, and then Google Spreadsheets to query? Is there a cleaner/easier way? Is this a good way to make a real mess of simple data?

FYI: I have this all set up in Google Spreadsheets right now. Employees #1-25 are submitting hand-written reports and Data Entry Clerk #1 is keying it all in. It is working fine for now, but the spreadsheets are getting bulky and slow to open and the Data Entry Clerk is really an accounting person that doesn't want to key this crap in forever....

OK. That is a wall of text (that means I will probably not get a response, but am risking it anyway). Looking forward to a spirited conversation.....

 

[Cogman]

How important is it to be able to see your data as a spread sheet? Would it be possible to just display the data through a web page?

I ask this because playing with spreadsheets and databases is harder than it should be. You might find it easier to continue what you are doing now, or dropping support for the spreadsheet like access. Keeping the spreadsheet access and doing what you want to do won't be the easiest thing. But it is possible http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWCLROPKug0

If you really want to use a database, and you want more than one person to access it, then I would recommend not using MS Access. Data can be quickly corrupted as Access really wasn't built for multiuser access. A SQL server such as MySQL, MS SQL, or Postresql are all good choices for a databases (and servers that have these databases can be cheap to rent.)

 

[Apathetic]

I'll second Cogman's warning. MS Access was designed as a single user database. Having multiple users making changes will eventually cause your database to get corrupted. Having multiple users READ the data is OK. Multiple users making changes will create a never ending nightmare.

Check out any of the other databases that Cogman recommended.

Dave

 

[Evadman]

If you really want to use a database, and you want more than one person to access it, then I would recommend not using MS Access.

Absolutely, positively agree. I recommend reading this article I wrote.

If I understand how the OP is setting this up though, the JET engine is only going to see 1 user (the server). It doesn't matter that 100 people are accessing the website; the only user of the access database is the webserver. The JET engine is decent at keeping 1 user from blowing up a db. Depending on how google would connect to the db to pull data, it may be the same user (web server) or perhaps a 2nd user if going though something besides the web server.

Having said that though, using access for anything mission critical is a bad decision. If you have 100 users, then you should use a real RDMS.