Re: MS Access usefulness and size restrictions

That's fine, Wayne -- then perhaps you'll not make a fool of yourself in public again in this thread. However, let me explain. There are a number of factors that affect performance in an Access/Jet multiuser environment. They include:

• hardware environment
• software environment
• network environment
• requirements of the application
• design of the application
• implementation of the application

Now, it is possible that the first three are not under the control of the person creating the database application, though it is certainly his/her responsibility to determine if they are adequate for the application, based on the requirements. The person creating the application also has the responsibility to understand the requirements, and to design the database application to meet those requirements, and to implement that design using the features of the tool chosen to satisfy the design.

We have participants in the Access newsgroup who have databases with millions of records, with significant update loads, and sizes well over the 1GB or 2GB (depending on version) database size limit (by the expendient of linking tables in multiple database files). We have participants who routinely create Access/Jet databases with 50-70 users. These are fact, not imaginings, not delusion.

Our concensus of experience is that to support 90 or more concurrent users, almost all these
factors must be "right", but that for the application to fall over with 4 or 5 users, a significant number of them, including some that are the responsibility of the creator of the database, must be "wrong". I don't _have_ to see your implementation to know that you did something very wrong -- given what else you've described, my guess would be that was in design and implementation, but it could have been in blindly assuming that your hardware and network were adequate for requirements of the database application at hand, or, indeed, that Access was the appropriate database tool (in which case, of course, you should never have reached the point of implementing to determine that it would poop out at some particular user base). It is certainly, verifiably, from our accumlated experience _not the case_ that "Access fails with more than 5 users".

"wayne" <no_at_email.please.com> wrote in message news:9fs75p$ea2_at_dispatch.concentric.net...
> > Do you recall an old adage, "It's a poor workman who blames his tool."?
 You
> > _do_, of course, have to know what you're doing. It is certainly
 possible
 to
> > make most any database choke up far below its capacity if you don't use
 it
> > correctly. The fact that you did that doesn't make _Access_ the culprit.
>
> All right. You crossed the line into language bigotry (you've never even
> seen my code, nor have you any idea of what my systems do!).
>
> I am not reading the rest of your post and I am not answering to you
> anymore.
>
>
Received on Sat Jun 09 2001 - 17:57:00 CDT