A call for ideas from Notes Client developers
My friend and I have been philosophizing about what to do with a specific Lotus Notes application. The application is roughly eight years old and it’s bloated. It’s literally busting at the seams with code.
I’m going to say right now… that with unlimited resources (aka time and money) this application should be rewritten. I wouldn’t even promise that I would re-do it in Lotus Notes. But that’s another story.
The application now has a long list of enhancements. One enhancement (our favorite), is a requirement to create a relational reporting system of the data. All of the data (minus the rich-text fields). Many other requirements call for interfacing with other systems at the company. Some might be Web Services but a lot of the transactions (I think) are done in TIBCO.
My friend (bless his heart) is sold on an idea. His idea is to (somehow) create a LIVE SQL Server back-end to this data. Basically, on the open and save of the data… it will all be sync’ed to a Microsoft SQL Server (DB2 is not in the company and is not an option).
I’m trying to see it his way but I really have no experience with something like this. I’ve offloaded Notes data to reporting databases before but I’ve never loaded and saved ALL of the data to/from an external system. I have so many doubts running through my mind.
Have you guys done this? How feasible is it to take an existing (a big fat one… I mean like orca fat) application and move the data to SQL Server while keeping the Notes Client interface? Is this something for DECS?
I appreciate any suggestions. I’m at a loss for trying to convince him to try a different path.
There are 3 Comments to "A call for ideas from Notes Client developers"
I have done this with DECS and LEI – its simple and fast DECS come FREE as its a light version of LEI – but without knowing more i would recommend DECS/LEI for this SQL / Notes Project. But why SQL ? do you know MySQL ? SQL is very exspensive where MySQL is free.
I love thease kinda apps that someone just out of the blue say´s ” lets use SQL for this DB ” without any reason at all or maybe so they can say ” we use SQL ” Good luck
DECS is great if all the data is entered through the Notes client (or Notes web UI). I think it would be perfect for your situation. The big issue will be to figure out what data you keep in your Notes documents and what data can only be in the SQL database. But the DECS documentation is good, and you have the integration forum on LDD that can help you as well. Obvisouly, all data for views will have to stay on the Domino server. You can also keep everything in Notes, but that would defeat the purpose a bit, wouldn’t it!
I have done a similar thing before, and the prototype was developed with a MS Access database. The difference in speed was amazing, even though MS Access is not the best DB engine in the world. Try to do a simple demo first, to get a feel on how DECS works. You will see that it’s not so complicated, and moving the data into the SQL DB can be coded in LotusScript using LCLSX or ODBC.
One last word of advice: be careful withmultivalue fields: they are a bit of a pain, but not so much!
Have fun and please keep us posted on your progress!!!
@Palmi – They have a zillion SQL Server boxes… that’s they only environment they plan to push to
@Palmi and Benoit – Thank guys! I have a lot more confidence in DECS than I did before. I didn’t even think about the data not being available for the views.
I think they have no choice but to start this project with just a subset of the data in the NotesDocument.