I have been looking for some advice for a while on how to handle a project I am working on, but to no avail. I am pretty much on my fourth iteration of improving an "application" I am working on; the first two times were in Excel, the third Time in Access, and now in Visual Studio. The field is manufacturing.

The basic idea is I am taking read-only data from a massive Sybase server, filtering it and creating much smaller tables in Access daily (using delete and append Queries) and then doing a bunch of stuff. More specifically, I use a series of queries to either combine data from multiple tables or group data in specific ways (aggregate functions), and then I place this data into a table (so I can sort and manipulate data using DAO.recordset and run multiple custom algorithms). This process is then repeated multiple times throughout the database until a set of relevant tables are created.

Many times I will create a field in a query with a value such as 1.1 so that when I append it to a table I can store information in the field from the algorithms. So as the process continues the number of fields for the tables change.

The overall application consists of 4 "back-end" databases linked together on a shared drive, with various output (either front-end access applications or Excel).

So my question is is this how many data driven applications that solve problems essentially work? Each backend database is updated with fresh data daily and updating each takes around 10 seconds (for three) and 2 minutes(for 1).

Project Objectives. I want/am moving to SQL Server soon. Front End will be a Web Application (I know basic web-development and like the administration flexibility) and visual-studio will be IDE with c#/.NET.

Should these algorithms be run "inside the database," or using a series of C# functions on each server request. I know you're not supposed to store data in a database unless it is an actual data point, and in Access I have many columns that just hold calculations from algorithms in vba.

The truth is, I have seen multiple professional Access applications, and have never seen one that has the complexity or does even close to what mine does (for better or worse). But I know some professional software applications are 1000 times better then mine.

So Please Please Please give me a suggestion of some sort. I have been completely on my own and need some guidance on how to approach this project the right way.