About the Series ...
This article continues the series, MS Access for the
Business Environment. The primary focus of this series is an
examination of business uses for the MS Access relational database management
system. The series is designed to provide guidance in the practical application
of data and database concepts to meet specific needs in the business world. The
majority of the procedures I demonstrate in this article and going forward will
be undertaken within MS Access 2003, although most of the concepts that
we explore in the series will apply to earlier versions of MS Access, as well.
For more information on the series, as well as the hardware
/ software requirements to prepare for the tutorials we will undertake, please
see Tutorial
1: Create a Calculated Field with the
Expression Builder.
Introduction to this Tutorial
This article, the second of a
two-part lesson, continues the topic of creating and loading an MS Access
database with the data contained in the Windows 2000 Event Log. We
discussed in Part I the fact that the Event Viewer, the interface
from which we typically view and manipulate sometimes critical messages regarding
many aspects of our Windows 2000 PCs and server operations, doesn't lend itself
to easy analysis or the collection and reporting of statistics.
In this lesson, we will pick up
where we left off in Part I,
with the import of an example log into an MS Access database. In Part I, we
examined the usefulness of an export utility supplied in the Windows 2000
Resource Kit for dumping a selected component of the Event Log to a
text file, after discussing the nature of the Event Log and the logs it
contains, as well as the data contained in the entries that accumulate in those
logs. We discussed the Elogdmp utility as an easy-to-use option for
exporting Event Log data to an MS Access database, examining aspects of
its use. Finally, we performed a hands-on exercise using the utility to dump an
Application log.
In this article, we will continue
with the steps required to import the file into MS Access, including the
following:
-
Import of the Application log that we exported in Part I with the Elogdmp utility;
-
Establishment of specifications for handling the data types of
various components in the dump file;
-
Creation and population of an MS Access database in a multi-step
process;
-
Discussion of the use of the error table generated by MS Access
as a part of the import operation, together with options for avoiding errors
that might be found;
-
Discussion of potential uses for the new Event Log
database, as well as options for automation of the concepts involved in its
creation.
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