Re: How does Access 97 rate as a front end?

From: Jay Canha <jpc37_at_email.med.yale.edu>
Date: 1999/01/05
Message-ID: <36924030.56C6314E@email.med.yale.edu>#1/1

I have done both, and there is a BIG difference between using access a front end and as a backend.
I suspect people worried about a 50MB limit are talking about the backend limitations.

I worked on a medium sized (about 50 tables and over 200 meg of data) project with access 2.0 (Widows 3.1 version) as a front end, oracle 7.1 as the back end, and ODBC 2.0. Worked reasonably well. Unfortuneatly I can't comment on the new ODBC drivers but there are a few out there, so if one doesn't work another may.

Pros: Very fast development times (even faster than VB)

         Simple distribution (with developers toolkit).
         Simplifies working with oracle, you can work with tables and
modify data with the Access GUI through odbc.
        (This can save alot of time for oracle newbies)

Cons: Slow
        Problems running server side stored procedures.
        ODBC can be a pain to set up.
        Really big result sets (>10MB) from queries or large table

widths (about 1 k) CAN get to big for the client side database engine. The number of rows in a TABLE isn't that much of an issue since the server hadling those tables and only the result set of a query passes to the client. (Unless you ask for the table, of course). Received on Tue Jan 05 1999 - 00:00:00 CST