Alex White MCDBA MCSE said:
Hi Larry,
Read your comments, it is interesting the different views we all have,
Yes, it is interesting... for a number of years I worked on a client
company's Access 2.0 client to an Informix database. As I am sure you know,
the only option was Access-Jet-ODBC-serverDB. When I last worked on it, it
was happily supporting between 175 - 200 users. I've worked on Access 97
DBs, similarly configured, but not with quite so many users.
There have been numerous detailed reports here of problems with early
versions of Access 2000, and with early versions of ADP. My experience is
that applying all the Service Packs and Jet updates makes Access 2000
reasonably solid and stable. But in Michael Kaplan's words, "I'd rather
slide down a giant razor blade into a vat of iodine than undertake a
development project with an unupdated Access 2000." Particularly given that
it is now "out of support".
My limited experience with ADP was, indeed, in maintaining and enhancing an
application with Access 2000 SP1. I did not run into serious problems, but
it was an unusual-design application. The original author had neither bound
any forms, nor defined primary keys on the SQL Server 2000 tables that it
accessed. I saw no advantage to ADP over using MDB and ODBC, either in
stability nor performance.
Larry Linson
Microsoft Access MVP