Databases

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Each company uses its own set of databases to keep track of things such as inventory, customers, and the status of orders. These databases are described in Tables 11-3 and 11-4. To use these databases in the BizTalk solution described in this chapter, you'll need to follow the instructions in the section titled "System Setup," later in this chapter. These are all Microsoft databases, so you can open them up to see the data structures and relationships.

Table 11-3. The Toi Carz databases.

Database	Description
Employees.mdb	A database of all employees and their budget authority level.
Inventory.mdb	The master inventory database containing information about all items that Toi Carz currently has in stock.
Vendors.mdb	A list of all products supplied by all vendors Toi Carz does business with. This database is updated whenever Toi Carz gets a new catalog from an existing vendor or a new vendor is signed up.
PurchaseOrders.mdb	A database with two tables: PORequests, which contains a list of all purchase requisitions submitted by Toi Carz employees; and POSent, which contains information on all purchase orders that have been generated and sent to vendors.

Table 11-4. The Toy Car Parts databases.

Database	Description
Customers.mdb	A list of all customers and their account status. Toy Car Parts will use this information to determine whether a customer is current in paying its bills before more product is sent to the customer.
Inventory.mdb	The master inventory database that contains all items in stock, their quantities, and their prices.
Orders.mdb	A database containing orders that were placed with the PlaceOrder system. This database integrates with Toy Car Parts systems that turn an order into a shipment and handle the proper accounting.

NOTE

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The PurchaseOrders.mdb database contains two tables linked from the Vendors.mdb database. These tables are named catalog and vendors. If you install the databases in a directory path other than the default (C:\TravisBook\Ch11\ToiCarz\), you'll need to update these links from within Access.

The purchase requisition system in our examples uses ODBC to simplify database connectivity across different database vendors. All the databases described in Tables 11-3 and 11-4 are simple Access database (.mdb) files, but they could very easily be Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle databases. Of course, changing the files to SQL or Oracle might require a change in some of the code.