Access 2003 Network Robustness

[MasterRacker]

I haven't done much Access development in a while. I'm now involved with creating a system where I will have a number of front-ends locally on PCs posting data to a server based back-end.

In the "old days" we used to have problems with the back-end getting corrupted if a front-end PC crashed, suffered a network drop, etc.

How resilient is Access 2003 to these type of things?

My front-ends will only be doing infrequent postings to the back-end and I wondering if I need to do some special connection handling.



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Jeff
[small][purple]It's never too early to begin preparing for [/purple]International Talk Like a Pirate Day
"The software I buy sucks, The software I write sucks. It's time to give up and have a beer..." - Me[/small]

 

[fneily]

Not sure what you mean by "resilient" - self healing? I've had troubles with ghost lockfiles, dropped links, needed to do compact and repairs, but then that seems kinda normal when dealing with a network.

 

[MasterRacker]

resilient" - Cool. There goes the spellchecker changing meaning on me. I meant "resistant".

Basically I'm just wondering how the frequency of corruptions, etc. in 2003 compares with, say Access 97. More problems, less problems, no change?

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Jeff
[small][purple]It's never too early to begin preparing for [/purple]International Talk Like a Pirate Day
"The software I buy sucks, The software I write sucks. It's time to give up and have a beer..." - Me[/small]

 

[evalesthy]

We have numerous databases (several dozen) running on a wide variety of networks. Most are Access 2000 or 2003. Some are up to 30-35 users (not necessarily concurrent). I can only think of 2-3 corruption issues in the past year or two and all could be recovered from by doing the standard 'compact and repair'. Most users have not experienced a corruption. However, if you know the network to be 'shaky' I would be concerned. Dropped connections in Access are not a good thing.

 

[maxhugen]

I'd tend to agree with evalesthy... I have 97, 2000 and 2003 versions running quite reliably across networks. Main probs I found were network issues (some years back), but a compact/repair usually fixed any data corruption ok.

Max Hugen
Australia

 

[MasterRacker]

I'm looking at a low volume app, where data will posted to the back-end infrequently. I'm considering opening the connection the the backend tables, posting and closing the connection since I'm not worried about performance in this one.

_____
Jeff
[small][purple]It's never too early to begin preparing for [/purple]International Talk Like a Pirate Day
"The software I buy sucks, The software I write sucks. It's time to give up and have a beer..." - Me[/small]

 

[sentineluk]

Hi Jeff,

If you are only looking to update the BE infrequently then you should have no problems at all.

There is no real reason to connect, do changes and then disconnect.

The other thing i would sugest would be that any information that is for viewing only then set the Record set type to snapshot so jet does not have to spend time tracking changes and locks.

Garry

 

[MasterRacker]

Garry. interesting idea. Is that something yo do on in the front-end? If I had a couple of FEs that were doing updates and others simply for viewing or reports, that would be a nobrainer.

_____
Jeff
[small][purple]It's never too early to begin preparing for [/purple]International Talk Like a Pirate Day
"The software I buy sucks, The software I write sucks. It's time to give up and have a beer..." - Me[/small]

 

[sentineluk]

You can select any form within the frontend to either be dynaset or snapshot. A main form could be dynaset and the subform could be snapshot.

Garry