Many of the details of setting up an Enterprise database are specific to the DBMS (Oracle or SQL Server), and your corporate IT environment. This manual contains only general comments.
You will need to decide how much disk space to allocate to your database. The guidelines below for planning the size of MS Access databases should not be assumed to hold for an Enterprise database, which may use a completely different means of physical storage, and may require much more space for index and system files. The most important point is that you have the capability of expanding the database size after it has been created and loaded.
At least one user ID must be set up for the database with permissions to create, alter and drop tables, and to add, update and delete rows. Rangecam Office System will use this ID in order to initialize the database tables.
If you are connecting to the Enterprise database over a corporate network, it may be necessary to install ODBC drivers on client computers and set each one up with ODBC DSNs. Although the Rangecam installation does this job automatically for MS Access, it does not do the same for Oracle.
The first time you connect to an Enterprise database, Rangecam will create its table structure. A dialog will appear prompting you to initialize the database. Initialization is required only once for each Enterprise database. Caution: the database initialization procedure destroys all Rangecam tables in the database before creating new ones. If the procedure is used on an existing database, all data will be lost! If you open a database that you think contains data, and you are prompted to initialize the database, do not proceed! Seek technical assistance instead.
After initializing an Enterprise database you can proceed to populate it with data. This is normally done by importing data from one or more MS Access databases, although you also can enter data directly. Step-by-step instructions are found in customer-specific documentation supplied by Industrial Metrics.