Should I use Azure for this?

  • A friend of mine owns a bakery. His data needs are pretty simple, so in theory I could use Access (shudder)... It's basically Recipes, Recipe Ingredients, Ingredient Purchases, and Sales of finished product. He uses Square for sales, and Fillet (ingredient costing, inventory, etc) and a funky Dough Calculator to scale ingredients, and Quickbooks for mileage and expense tracking. Right now I'm building a prototype solution for him in Access (because it's cheap and it's an easy UI). I'm wondering if I use Azure for his data storage and then PowerBI to do the reporting, can he run all this from his iPad? (I think he can - it's just a web page.) Right? Just don't want to spend time going down the wrong road. What services in Azure would he need to make this fly?

    Thanks!

    Pieter

     

  • pietlinden wrote:

    A friend of mine owns a bakery. His data needs are pretty simple, so in theory I could use Access (shudder)... It's basically Recipes, Recipe Ingredients, Ingredient Purchases, and Sales of finished product. He uses Square for sales, and Fillet (ingredient costing, inventory, etc) and a funky Dough Calculator to scale ingredients, and Quickbooks for mileage and expense tracking. Right now I'm building a prototype solution for him in Access (because it's cheap and it's an easy UI). I'm wondering if I use Azure for his data storage and then PowerBI to do the reporting, can he run all this from his iPad? (I think he can - it's just a web page.) Right? Just don't want to spend time going down the wrong road. What services in Azure would he need to make this fly?

    Thanks!

    Pieter

    With all that self contained software that has a lot of it's own reporting, why complicate things?  As Brent Ozar would ask, "What problem are you trying to solve"?

     

    --Jeff Moden


    RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
    First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
    ________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.

    Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.


    Helpful Links:
    How to post code problems
    How to Post Performance Problems
    Create a Tally Function (fnTally)

  • Wait, I have to solve a problem??? <g>

    He's not a computer guy at all. And most of his computer-related work he does on his iPad. So unless I do something ugly like install Parallels or whatever, I can't run Windows software at all. Access is an option. the reporting isn't great for crosstabs, but i could use Excel for that, but he'd still need a computer.

    I guess I could just split the db into FE/BE and send those as I update them, and then use Excel for reporting. Parameterized reports in Access are clunky and horrid, but doable.

  • This was removed by the editor as SPAM

  • Honestly, it sounds like you just need a spreadsheet to rope a few bits & bobs together. I'm with Jeff, focus more on what we're attempting to solve, less on the technology. The tech will come along.

    That said, I'd rather hand someone an Azure SQL Database backed web page, than an Access backed anything. Yes, they are going to have to pay for Azure (and technically should be paying something for Access). However, they get backups, failover, most of the maintenance done for them, all stuff that you'll need to do in Access on your own, but on a more stable reliable platform.

    Still, focus first on what problem you're solving, then find the tech to solve it.

    "The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
    - Theodore Roosevelt

    Author of:
    SQL Server Execution Plans
    SQL Server Query Performance Tuning

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