EVE Technology Lab

Afternoon all!

I couldn’t find anything on this when I searched, but I’m at work and didn’t really try that hard either. I was wondering if anybody has any experience using MS Access when creating a desktop eve app. The reason for this? I have to make use of access for a class so I’m just trying to find a way to make it useful to me after the class also.

My experience with access is pretty much nonexistent, and my experience with crest is also very low. I’ve used to old APIs before but that was a few years ago.

I would like to import crest market data and use access as a database for the app to pull from. Is this something that won’t take me ages to get going? I can spend a week or so getting it to talk nicely before I’ll start falling behind.

Any thoughts or insight will be appreciated

VBA is a total pita to use with json.

Depending on what you want to do, you might find it easier to use python to update the database, then use access to do stuff with that loaded data.

Last time I tried to work with MS Access and eve it was a huge pain. The problem is that many of the things you'll pull from use different xml scheme than what access is used to. The eve api for instance uses attribute centric xml, and access only works well with element centric (or the other way around). You'll hit similar issues with eve central. MS Access is incredibly picky about scheme. If you know how to work with Xlst you can get around this (I think). Some of these are avoidable by creating linked tables in access and handling the xml in excel tables, since excel is actually fairly competent at handling varied xml forms.

Another option which may or may not be available is to find another program that does all the back end work for you. The only market app I know of which is compatible with Microsoft access is Eve Wallet Aware. Not sure if it's working (tried to install it last night and I couldn't)

Not sure how any of this applies to CREST though. My experience is a bit dated.

Depends on your perspective.

If we are talking about RDBMS, here's my opinion.

If you wonna stick with Microsoft use SQL Server. It's an RDBMS that suites any need. Now that SQL Server is coming to Linux, same way that Linux bash is coming to Windows (only WIndows 10), I can see anyone's investment on SQL Server to pay off.

On the other hand, if you wonna avoid Microsoft, I would recommend Postgre. Sure MySQL is great too but from the 'investment' point of you, I would go with Postgre.

Once you know the SQL basics, it all comes down to learning the syntax. T-SQL is preferable for SQL Server.
Here you can see a small sample of the syntax differences between different SQL implementations (This is actual code used in the EVESDEtoSQL tool I made).

Here is a search guide on learning SQL.
Personally it took me about a month to fully learn T-SQL, but I also had day by day practice at work.

When learn SQL make sure you learn the standards and not some vendor version it'll pay off more in the end. You can make SQL Server and MySQL both into modes that vary much improve their compatibility to SQL-92 standards. Postgres general follows the standards much closer and doesn't seem to have any options to do better. The advantage of course to using the standard syntax is that then you can switch DBs and at most have to just add or remove a few lines that switch to that mode but everything else is the same or to put it another way no vendor lock Another DB that actual has better then expected standard support is Access. I've been surprised many times how well it does but it still has many other limitations that make it hard to use for anything really complex.

I personally like MySQL or more correctly should say MariaDB as it's an improved version being developed by some of the original team from before MySQL got bought out.

Anyway that's my 2 cent worth.