Re: MS Access usefulness and size restrictions

"Terry Foster" wrote

> Yes, it appears that Jet is dead. Mostly because MSDE is as good and
> more scalable (read: MS just stopped developing Jet?) Access XP was
> just released this year which indicates it will probably survive far
> beyond the three years predicted.

It's been clearly stated that Microsoft has put Jet "in maintenance mode". It is not at all clear that "MSDE is as good and more scalable" -- it has, in my experience, always been a bit more trouble to create, maintain, and install client-server implementations than Access-Jet ones. MSDE (and the desktop edition of SQL Server) are limited to 5 concurrent queries, and the most (repeat _most_) concurrent users I have ever heard reported with MSDE was 25, far below the number that we've reliably heard for Jet.

You can certainly "scale" your Access-MSDE application to Microsoft SQL Server, but that is a whole different ballgame. Even the low-end, Small Business Server, editions of SQL Server cost many times what Access (and whichever supplied back end you use). Just getting back to the 5 users that MSDE clearly ought to support will cost you over $2K.

I don't understand what you mean by "Access XP was just released this year which indicates it will probably survive far beyond the three years predicted." I particularly don't understand "survive far beyond the three years predicted" -- within the past year I have done maintenance work on an Access 2.0 client application for a Fortune 50 corporation. I first worked on that in 1995, but it was begun in 1994, and as far as I know, there are no plans to replace it with a later version or different applications even today. Received on Sun Jul 22 2001 - 01:47:32 CDT