How much data before it starts to creak?

[Colin Basterfield]

Hi there,

I have a client whom has a application that uses Access, purely for its
backend storage rather than for any GUI purposes, and it is about 45megs
worth now, and although it gets Compacted and Repaired every week, it does
some wierd things, losing records for no reason. Now obviously this could
be a bug in the program that provides the front end, but if so it is proving
exteremely hard to re-produce.

What are peoples views on the limits of Access?

TIA
Colin

 

[Douglas J. Steele]

45 MB is really not that large for an Access database. How many users are
there? How do they interact with it?

 

[Van T. Dinh]

I have one currently running with 100 MB (after compact) without any
problems.

It is more likely that the number of users hitting the database *at the same
time* is more of a problem. OTOH, the non-Access Front-End usually connects
the database for only a very short time to get the data and then disconnects
from the database so this is probably not applicable in your case.

 

[(PeteCresswell)]

Per Colin Basterfield:

I have a client whom has a application that uses Access, purely for its
backend storage rather than for any GUI purposes, and it is about 45megs
worth now, and although it gets Compacted and Repaired every week, it does
some wierd things, losing records for no reason.

My experience is that there are other things besides the size of the DB that can
cause problems. Network, NICs.....

Nobody can prove a negative - i.e. I can't really say that I never lost data -
but I can say that we never had an issue about lost data with any of my users,
and that includes one app where the back end is over 200 megs and is used all
day every day by about 6 people.

OTOH, I've had plenty of situations where the backend DB was corrupted/unusable
- LAN server setup, NICs as far as I know.

 

[Colin Basterfield]

Hi,

These replies are all really useful to me, so thank you very much for your
time.

Cheers
Colin