Client /Server

[JanTore]

I've made an app in VB with ADO connection to a Access database. And I'm wondering if several users can connect to the database at the same time from different client computers if the database is located on a server.

 

[kevinclark]

Yes you can do this but Microsoft Access is more a desktop database, and does not perform well for high-volume, multi-user use. Regardless of Microsoft's claims to support X number of connections it has been my experience that the performance can degrade rapidly after as few as 5 connections. If you find that you require more client connectivity (you end up suffering performance issues) you could try using MySQL - its better (cheap) and you could likely change it over relatively easy.

 

[petermeachem]

It's worth pointing out that the the performance dropoff depends a lot on the data and what you are doing with it. You can have a lot more than 5 working quite happily and can have very large databases.
Kevin do you have any experience with vb/mysql. I'm thinking of using it for a customer. They have three offices. One is read only, one does students and is read only on colleges and the other does colleges and is reda only on students. This would be a pain with MS Sql (and expensive) but much easier with MySql. Peter Meachem
peter@accuflight.com

 

[JanTore]

Thanks
There will only be 5 people accessing the database at the most, so I think I'll stay with Access for now.
By the way, isn't there an Access To MySQL converter program some where on the net, I think I've read someting about that?

 

[kevinclark]

I have used MySQl in a couple situations similar to yours Peter (Actually one was using VB while the other was using Active Server Pages where the Server had MyODBC installed). I have not found setting up user accounts to be too difficult and actually found it to be quite powerful. Its popularity seems to be growing and so I would imagine there are plenty of third party apps out there on the net to help make life easier. To convert an MS Access database over to MySQL I generally just export the data to a text delimited file, create the MySQl Database Tables and then uploaded the data to the new database.