Limitation on use of Access 97

[princejazzman]

I have scoured the internet and Microsofts publications looking for a definitive answer to this question to present to my management.
My opinion, and certainly that of many of my ACCESS development friends is that ACCESS 97 should not exceed 10 concurrent users or 500Mb in size as this will severely impact the performance of the database.
Can anyone point me to or indeed confirm these figures as MICROSOFT seem to insist that 255 concurrent users and 1Gb are the limits within its documentation and help files.

 

[KenReay]

Hi

There is no definitive answer to this question.

The Specification from Microsoft (for Access97) is included in Help, under Specifications, and does as you say specify 255 users and 1gb as the max size of any mdb file.

The 1 gb limit is absolute, but even that you can squeeze around by having tables in seprearte mdb files and linking to them, so effectively this means that maximum table size is 1gb.

The number of users is much more subjective, it depends on what the users are doing (ie viewing or updating), how well the application has been written. the 'quality' of the hardware.

You will find examples on Newsgroups (including this one) of people having problems with as few as 4/5 users, whilst others are happily handing 50+ !!

My personal experince is that upto 20 users is OK, given a well written application and good hardware, but I have experience of at least one application with 40 concurrent users which worked well (a problem about once every two months on average, in a 7day 12 hour day situation).

Again my personal experience is that the size of the databse in terms of megabytes is not the major factor, the number of concurrent users, doing updates, it the biggest factor.

Hope this helps
Regards

Ken Reay
Freelance Solutions Developer
Boldon Information Systems Ltd
Website needs upgrading, but for now -

http://www.kenneth.reay.btinternet.co.uk

UK

 

[ringo9]

I wish there was a definitive answer too. I have over 900 users actually set up in my database, where as usually no more than 20 are on at the same time. My opinion is that my company is too large to be using Access for the function that we use it for, but upper management loves it. My manager and I also happen to think that the database sucks, but again, we won't be able to convince upper management, until the thing crashes.

I'm glad I'm not the only database administrator(not programmer) that has this issue.