Integrating Excel and Access

SQL Server Summary

This chapter went into some intermediate-level topics on SQL Server that you may not already be familiar with. I could write several chapters on the topics covered, but I just wanted to introduce them in this chapter. If you type in the examples as shown, you can see how they work. I find that by following examples and tweaking code, I learn a lot about how things work. I encourage you to follow these examples, and I strongly suggest that you test everything in Pubs or Northwind before trying it on a production database if you are not completely familiar with SQL Server.

If you are already familiar with SQL Server, I hope that the topics on DTS introduced you to some additional functionality. When I work with clients using SQL Server, I find that very few take advantage of the ActiveX script tasks, Email tasks, and scheduling functionality, except in the case of administrative tasks. There are so many ways to use the scheduling tool that I even use it when it doesn't involve SQL Server. You can create connections to Access databases with DTS and drop and create tables on a daily basis for different types of reporting, even if none of the data is on SQL Server. In addition, you can find a lot of good examples in the SQL Server Books Online if you get stumped trying to figure something out.

It is going to be increasingly difficult to ignore SQL Server and other enterprise databases as these databases are used at more companies. Even though it is unlikely that you ...