Blog

I’ve seen a few posts in various mailing lists lately where people were making strange technology assumptions, and I wanted to clear things up. Not that anybody reads my blog, or cares what I think… 😉Myth 1: You can use MS Access for a production database.Truth: MS Access can work well for small office environments where only a handful of people will sporadically use your CF app. But you should never be caught putting an access database behind a large application. Sure, you can use CF’s caching abilities to overcome Access’s scalability problems, but I don’t see the need to go through the pain when you can easily use any of these free: MS SQL Server 2005 Express, MySQL, Oracle Express, PostgreSQL, and IBM DB2 Express-C. MS Access is not free. On a side note, did you know that Ben Forta wrote a MySQL Crash Course book?Myth 2: I’d like to use Apache, but I’ve got a Windows server and Apache only runs on Linux.Truth: The Apache Foundation has a perfectly stable, widely deployed Windows HTTP Server. Apache currently holds 60% of the Web Server market for public facing websites. Some time in the not too distant past, I compiled some stats from 2-3 different sources and found that most Apache installs are actually on Windows. Part of the reasoning for this is that the majority of websites are hosted by Windows servers, and since Apache holds 60%, I think it might be concluded that the majority of Apache installs are on Windows. But I can’t seem to find any solid facts one way or another on this.Myth 3: Ben Forta is Scorpio Man.Truth: Despite all the evidence to the contrary, I read somewhere that Ben Forta claims not to be Scorpio Man. I can’t verify this, but that beard looks vaguely familiar…