Re: Access & Scaling

[Wynn Osborne <wynn@xxxxxxxxxx>]

a Microsoft Development Partner wrote:

>Access is written to be a "personal" DBMS.  All access to Access is at the
>workstation level (not at the server level).  In a multi-user LAN
>environment, all access to Access is controlled by the requesting
>workstation.  In a LAN environment, if you run a query over a 100,000
>record file, all 100,000 records will be communicated over your LAN to the
>workstation which is running the query.  This pretty much guarantees a
>problem with scalability in terms of LAN utilization (at a minimum).
>Corrupted databases are also a significant threat because the DBMS controls
>are being executed on a different machine than the machine which is holding
>the underlying data.

Hate to beat a dead horse , but I must rant:

To add to the statement above, (which is completely accurate BTW), forget
the LAN, forget the number of users. Throw 250,000 records into ONE table
and browse the table on your desktop---you will quickly see what a toy
Access really is. Add some more tables and relationships and you've got
yourself one big dog.

In other words, there IS NO SCALABILITY with Access. It's nominal use is
limited to just a few users and small datasets. Expectations beyond this
are mere pipe dreams.

I love Microsoft's GUI, which I believe is their greatest contribution to
computing. Beyond that however, I have found none of their products to be
"Ready for Prime Time". It is truly a shame. Their apps are fun to work
with and feature rich, and they are doubly fun to develop in. But...they
just can't run with the big boys.

Then again, what else would you expect from an AS/400 programmer?!

Carry on,
Wynn

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