Best Advice on Application Design Requested 1

[rkasnick]

I have a client who has a group of 12 designers and production engineers who all have a need to share data in a database. Better than half of them take work home as well as working in the office so a copy of the database travels with them, to be synch'd up to a master copy when they get into the office. Presently they are using Access 2003 with replication, which happens daily or in some individual cases every couple of days, however the database is growing exponentially with all the replication going on. (presently over 80 meg, over half of which is replication keys and strings)

I have been asked to provide advice/programming to reduce the size of the database while still maintaining the requirement of a shared/replicated database.

Has anyone worked on an application with similar requirements and how has the solution been built?
TIA

Rod Kasnick

 

[genomon]

Are you compacting the database & clones daily?

 

[rkasnick]

Thanks for the suggestion. The master and clones are set to compact on close. It doesn't help much. It is just a lot of data for about a dozen products which incorporate many parts and sub-assemblies each which are in development simultaneously.

 

[Golom]

80 MB isn't really huge as such things go. I routinely deal with Access databases in the 500-600 MB range with no problems. If you really want to address the issue you probably want to look at MSDE (Microsoft Data Engine). There's info at

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnmsde/html/msdeforvs.asp

MSDE is included with Office 2003 Professional and several other MS products and is a free download from MS. It is SQL-Server based and has most of SQL-Server's bells and whistles for controlling multi-user scenarios.

You can administer MSDE with Access using an Access Data Project.

 

[rkasnick]

Thanks for the tip, Golom, I gave you a star for pointing me in the direction of MSDE, which looks like it will serve the purpose.