About DB Development

Who we are
Andrew Vickers, the principle process optimiser, developer and project manager for all database applications we create, has not been a programmer for his entire working career. He started as a design engineer within the aircraft industry and moved on to designing products produced by plastic injection moulding at Hozelock and running a drawing office and then moving into project management in 1996 for Linde Refrigeration. In 1999 he took voluntary redundancy to set up on his own, at the time concentrating on automating the flow of information through offices by centralising data using Excel spreadsheets and moving into Access database development as a natural progression of this. (This process is now known as Business Process Consultancy, although we prefer to call it Business Process Optimisation!)

Over the last ten years he has been a Director of his own Limited Company which was also involved in network installations and support running successfully for 6 years, employing 6 people and turning over in excess of £300,000 p.a.

This business de-merged at the end of 2009, and DB Development is the current form of Andrew’s business concentrating again on databases and database driven websites.

What we do
DB Development learn the business processes of each client, and optimise them to reduce the administrative overhead.

Most businesses have an accounts package (often a flavour of Sage). This will do invoices, may do quotes, might look after stock control, Profit and Loss accounts and credit control. They may also have a sales order book (perhaps an Excel spreadsheet), an email system (usually Outlook, either with or without Exchange) and perhaps a separate customer relationship management (CRM) package such as ACT!

But for most companies, these systems don’t talk to each other, so information that’s been entered into the sales order book, then needs to be re-entered into the accounts package to produce a quote, and they might have another completely separate system for managing work in progress (WIP).

Wouldn’t it be nice if all these systems talked to each other?

Well, they can! And if they can’t, we can write a little database that will!

For our databases, we use Microsoft Access and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) as our primary tool, as this is a rapid development tool, part of the Microsoft Office suite, and does not require any special software on your PC. Even if you don’t have Microsoft Access, a cut down version of Access can be installed free of charge legally to enable you to run your database.

For larger applications, the back end of the database (where the data is held) can be created in SQL instead of Access which is geared towards more concurrent users and more records in the tables.

We can also create database driven websites for customers who need access to the database from multiple geographic locations which are not connected to the same network. We use the .Net 2 framework to create the web pages and SQL as the backend database engine for these applications.

This can also be achieved using Microsoft Access 2010 and a hosted Microsoft SharePoint Services application so in effect producing an Access database on the web! This can be considerably cheaper than a .aspx / SQL database.