lternative to MS ACCESS with VB.NET

[vc1881]

Hello,

I'm looking for an alternative to MS ACCESS, I'm building a database with over 300,000 records and was told ACCESS is not the best database, is filemaker the best alternative?. Can an ACCESS database be converted to filemaker?

Thanks,

Victor

 

[RiverGuy]

Well, the question is fairly broad. Are you going to be accessing the database from Visual Basic? (This is the Visual Basic .Net and up forum).

Anyways, there are alternatives but it depends on what you need. I would re ask your question in the Access forum. I'm not sure 300,000 records is too much for Access to handle. There are other free desktop databases such as SQLite and SQL Server Compact.

 

[vc1881]

I'm using VB.NET, I will look up the ones you mentioned.

Thanks,

Victor

 

[PRPhx]

300,000 rows dor Access can be a major pain. It depends on many things, including the number of users accessing your data at one time, how well your queries are built, Are you retrieving 1 row at a time or many, etc.

i would suggest you take a look at Microsoft SQL 2008 Express. It's a true database engine (where as Accecss really isn't - more of a data container) Sql Express also has a management front end that will allow you to build new db's, tables, queries, etc. The only thing I'm not sure of if it includes a data transformation service app or not. You would have to do some research there. OR you could liknk your Access tables to SQL Server Express.

No matter what free/inexpensive database you try, your probably going to run into issues, esp. with dates. Fields that hold a date and are empty may show up looking really weird. These you'll have to fix after you do your converting.