ACCESS or SQL Server?

[Metrokel]

I am a book publisher that will be telemarketing (outbound/inbound) a History book series covering the past 2000 years of Christianity. The telemarketing will be outsourced starting in February and migrated to our own call centre within the first year. At that time we will be implementing a predictive dialer that needs to interface with a COM Server which will send a GUI pop-up to the opertor when someone answers the phone.
Mine is a new company that requires a robust RDBMS. We plan to purchase call lists from topical magazines and newspapers, load them into the DB and forsee over 5M records by the end of year 2. My question is this: What DBMS would be best for me if I start with 300,000 records. Would It be best to build the front and back end using Access on a Client/Server envronment using MSDE and migrating to SQL Server or should I just bite the bullet and go SQL Server now? Also my accountant would like to use ACCPAC. If anyone has expereince interfacing ACCESS 2002 or SQL Server to ACCPAC, please let me know how labourious the task is.

 

[JerryDennison]

I cannot answer your second question but I would definitely start with SQL Server as the backend. Your front end can be Access if you wish. It seems reasonable based on your expected growth to start with the most robust scenario possible. Who knows, it may even save you money in the long run as you will not need to migrate anything later or have to see a reduction in performance.

 

[hsitz]

If money is a consideration, you don't lose much flexibility by starting out with MSDE as a backend. MSDE is essentially a somewhat crippled version of SQL Server 7.

It lacks some some of the management tools of SQL Server 7, but most of the functionality of those is duplicated when using data projects (.ADP) from Access 2000.

It also is designed to decline in performance as the number of concurrent users rises above 5 or so, which could easily be a big consideration depending on the install you plan to place it in.

MSDE also lacks a few other minor things, and has a maximum database size of 2GB.

But otherwise it's SQL Server 7 compatible, and it has the obvious advantage of being free. So you can start out for nothing now, and if you decide to upgrade to SQL Server down the line, you can just install SQL Server and continue using the same MSDE data file with no changes to the Access front end.

If you know you're going to need SQL Server eventually, it seems like you'd just want to start out with it. But if not, and depending how much it's worth to you to avoid paying for SQL Server, you might want to consider starting out with MSDE.

While MSDE is built to decline in performance as the number of concurrent users rises, I'm unaware of any purposefully-built-in decline in performance that takes place as the data file grows. So I don't think the mere fact that you have a large database makes SQL Server preferable, unless you expect it to grow larger than 2GB. That may be the factor that makes the decision for you, since your database sounds like it might grow larger than that fairly quickly. -- Herb