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Why use Access
Access is easy to get started with. It comes with 22 database templates that will allow you to create general databases for things such as record collections, memberships and so on. It also has many wizards that will take the pain out of creating things from scratch.
Access is part of the Office suite of programs, and it is therefore very easy to communicate with other such programs, such as Word, Excel and Outlook.
Access has been around for some time, in various versions, so most of the bugs (I guess that A2K is an exception to this) have been sorted, or are at least known. There is also a large amount of support available for free in the various Newsgroups.
As I mentioned earlier, there are limitations to what Access can do.
- The theoretical maximum number of concurrent users in an Access database is 255. However, this figure is just the maximum number possible, and you are more likely to find that the maximum number of users is about 50-100, although depending on your design, this might be less. This should certainly be borne in mind when starting to design a database, as it is almost guaranteed that although the initial brief called for only 15 users, after a year of operation there will probably be twice that using the database. Therefore over-engineering is required.
- Also, Access isn't configured to run as a client/server database, so it isn't optimized for running over a network. A true client/server application will only call the data from the server to the client that are needed. Therefore, you will probably see some network performance degradation.
- Access is also limited to how much data it can store. In Access 97, this is 1 Gigabyte per database, and in Access 2000 it is 2Gb, although you can have multiple databases used to store information in.
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Last modified at 06/06/2006 15:01:17