Introduction to data sources

Asta Powerproject projects are stored in data sources. Each data source can contain several projects. You have a choice of formats that you can choose when creating a new data source. You may want to create one data source in which to store your projects and another data source in which to baseline projects.

Asta Powerproject may work slowly if you set up and use more than two or three data sources per server.

Before you create a direct connection data source for use with the Asta Enterprise system (these are also known as ADO data sources, as they use ADO connectivity to connect to a database), you must first create an empty Microsoft SQL Server® database. You then establish a connection to the database by registering a direct connection data source in Server Admin. All work is saved directly in the data source.

We recommend that you do not override the default collation type (which is 'SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS' for English operating systems) when installing Microsoft SQL Server and when creating new databases, as overriding the default collation type can cause issues.

You can choose to use the 'optimise transaction data' facility when creating a direct connection data source. This is recommended, as it speeds up the system. In order to make use of 'optimise transaction data', you must set up a database instance and a user that has database administrator rights and 'bulk insert' rights.

Use of the 'optimise transaction data' facility calls Microsoft SQL Server's BULK INSERT statement during record insert operations. The Database Administrator must ensure that the Asta Powerproject user has at least the fixed server role 'bulkadmin' assigned. Members of the bulkadmin role are allowed to execute the BULK INSERT statement, but they still must have the INSERT permission on the tables on which they wish to insert data.