MS Access Records Size Limit 1

[charliec]

What is the limit of Access in terms of records and fields. What happens when the limit is reached (ie: does Access crash or will it give output but with errors)

 

[thornmastr]

The following is a quote from Larry Linson.

Total database size is essentially unlimited: In Access 97 and before a
single database can be 1 GIG, but tables in multiple databases can be
linked. Thus the 1 Gigabyte (slightly less for the overhead of keeping
that table in a database) is the limit on Table size. There's no stated
limit on records, though I personally suspect that a long integer, 2
billion and a few is what they use internally to keep track. 255 fields
per record maximim, and record length 2048 maximum, but OLE fields and
Memo fields are stored separately and their 'placeholder' in the record
only takes either 8 or 16 bytes. You will fill 1G fairly fast if one
table has hundreds of fields and millions of records. Some have
reported using hundreds of thousands or millions of records with
satisfactory performance, but if I were processing millions of records,
I'd long since have moved to an Access client to a server database such
as Informix, MS SQL Server, or Oracle.

Access 2000 doubles the database and, thus, table size to 2G, and
record length to 4096, but it uses Unicode to represent characters at 2
bytes per character, so if you have a lot of text data, you really
haven't gained much.
Robert Berman
Data Base consultant
Vulcan Software Services
thornmastr@yahoo.com