Notes Some Frustrations

I've posted a question on notes.net but thought I would duplicate it here in case anyone can help:-

" We have a domino 8 server running with a DB2 test server setup as a backend (on same machine). The DB2 backend is working fine and we have created a view in our DB2 enabled nsf. We can populate this view and see the data in DB2. We are having problems where a doc gets updated in notes but the change doesn't get populated to DB2 until we 'populate db2' from designer. The help indivates that a DAV should instantly update DB2 when data changes within the view. This is not happening.

Any help appreciated!"

As I say in the question above I was expecting the DAV in DB2 to automatically update (as the help docs say it will but doesn't seem to do it. Anyone got any experience of this?

Hit a problem with an agent  last week that is one of those things that gets very frustrating!

I had written an agent to get some data from a Notes DB, create a CSV and copy the file to our Cognos server to be imported later. Worked fine when run  but failed when the agent was scheduled. After some very frustrating testing worked out that the problem was that the file was being written out to a file identified by a UNC path (i.e. \\server\folder\filename.txt). This doesn't work when the Domino server is run as a service.

Not sure of the best solution... don't really want to map a drive .... ?????

I have spent the last few weeks trying out nsfdb2 on a Domino 8 server. Its a secondary task hence the time taken so far. With the use of a excellent powerpoint from Lotussphere (link to follow) I installed a DB2 and Domino 8 server on a Virtual WIn 2003 server). I got this working and then attempted to port a couple of apps to DB2 format using the appropriate compact command. For a simple application this worked fine but the compact failed on a larger application. The error message received on teh console was weird and not entirely helpful! See here for my Notes.net posting . many thanks to Bruce Lill for his helpful responses. It turns out that I had to replace the design of the database with a standard template, convert to DB2 and then replace design with proper one.

After this the database was using DB2 as its backend. The server showed the file on the file system as just 5kb for a 1GB database!

I then created some access views and was able to get our Cognos expert to connect to these views and import into cubes etc for Business Intelligence. All good.

Next step was to try out whether we could maintain our main apps on a Domino 7 server but have a replica on the 8 server (using DB2) for reporting purposes. Today got the 7 server installed and successfully created a replica from the DB2 version . Not tested in any depth but seems to work fine.

I do have some other questions though...

1) Is there a way of accessing DB2/400 data from a query view in Notes?

2) Could a RPG program write out directly to the DB2 access view and 'create' notes documents?

Anyone used nsfdb2 to exchange data with an iseries?

First Post, First Frustration!

How do people report from Domino applications?
we have a one or two large applications which require reporting functionality. They have a number of forms that are related to each other (i.e. Doc A can have many Doc B's - not responses). We need to report from these on a weekly/monthly basis and also on an ad-hoc basis.

Crystal Reports is OK but linking multiple form types is very slow...

JasperReports is OK but unfriendly from the client point of view and relies on NotesSQL... same linking slowness

Cognos - OK but has trouble running SQL queries on multiple tables through NotesSQL driver....

To me an ideal solution would be the DB2 backend as this should allow easy reporting from any app to DB2. I haven't had chance to install an 8 server yet but can an existing app be moved to DB2 backend easily? Are there performance issues?


Does anyone have any comments on how they cope with the Notes reporting issues and any guidance on the best way forward?