Access vs SQL

R

Richard

I'm looking for a general rule of thumb as to when to advise clients to use
an Access application versus moving up to SQL... web searching has yielded
only a small amount of info thus far... thanks
 
A

Arvin Meyer

I am perfectly comfortable with up to 50 users (20 of which will be into
heavy editing) and several hundred megabytes of data. My databases are
relatively well designed, and I only run them on quality hardware. The last
corruption I've seen was due to a faulty wireless card and was more than 20
months ago.

Go to SQL-Server if you need a secure sytem or if you have large numbers of
users (over 50) or large amounts of data (over 300 MBs). Also go to
SQL-Server if your network is marginal. File server databases, like Access,
require rock stable networks.
--
Arvin Meyer, MCP, MVP
Microsoft Access
Free Access Downloads
http://www.datastrat.com
http://www.mvps.org/access
 
L

Larry Linson

Arvin Meyer said:
I am perfectly comfortable with up to 50 users (20 of which will be into
heavy editing) and several hundred megabytes of data.
Click to expand...

A couple of comments:

Remember that initial estimates of user audience are almost always low (on
one client DB, the client project administrator initially said, "Never more
than 50 users." When I last worked on that DB, about five years later, there
were about 200 users. Fortunately, for reasons of reliability and
recoverability, it had been implemented as an Access client to a server
database, so it could have grown by more multiples and still been OK.That
would not have been the case if it had been implemented as Access multiuser.

But, reliability and recoverability are strong points of server databases,
such a Microsoft SQL Server. I have worked on DBs much smaller than the ones
Arvin describes which were Access client application to server database just
for these reasons.

Larry Linson
Microsoft Access MVP
 
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