Mass transfer - the detour

Friday I left my customer in New Philadelphia to look at his 5000 files (see part 2) for another customer in Cincinnati. They had just bought PDMWorks Enterprise and have asked me to convert their legacy data from Activault.

As you would expect, no Activault manuals could be found. It took me a while, but I was finally able to figure their Activault’s database schema. Once this was done I was pretty much home free to write code to find the old file, match it with the custom properties they wanted to keep then add it to the PDMWorks Enterprise vault.

I actually wrote the code in the Activault’s .mbd file. I am beginning to like witting code like this in MS Access. I find I get two great advantages: I don’t have to install Visual Studio on the customer’s machine, and the VBA in Access gives pretty quick ‘n’ easy access to the database.

….plus I got to enjoy the irony of using Activault’s database to contain code to cause its demise. (That being said Activault’s database structure is quite clean and appears to provide a snappy interface.)

The customer’s new PDMWorks Enterprise server is a Dell PowerEdge 2970. I cannot sing enough praises over this machine. I first ran a test conversion on my Dell M90 laptop and it took almost eight hours to convert their 19,752 files. Their PowerEdge did it in about 50 minutes.

Whooowee working with a database like found in PDMWorks Enterprise is a lot more fun than working with PDMWorks Workgroup! …Back to New Philadelphia next week to finish that project.