Capacity of MS Access?

[NeilFrank]

How much data is too much for Access? At what point should another database be considered? What are such databases?

 

[NeilFrank]

I should add: databases that are compatible with a Visual Basic 6 front end

 

[Golom]

Access 97 1 GB
Access 2K+ 2 GB

Usually, if you get to about 85-90% you will start to see performance problems but it depends on transaction load, network configuration and several other things.

The next (big) step is to Oracle or SQL Server (the mainstream products). Things like Sybase, mySQL and a few others can increase the size limitations.

Via ADO / ODBC just about everything is "compatible with VB" ... although some are easier to program. I find SQL Server not too bad while Oracle is (for me at least) more difficult. That's probably just my amateur status with Oracle talking however.

 

[HitechUser]

NeilFrank,

This is quite a loaded question. The "size" of an Access database is not indicative of the underlying database structures. Example being..

Ten simple tables containing 1 million records.
- or -
300 tables each with many relationships dependendent on each other (cascade updates / deletes). Complex joins.
- also -
Where is the database? Local or on a network or both?

Is performance your main concern? Maintainablity? Recovery? Connectivity? Upgradability? Number of concurrent users / connections?

All of these questions are unique to each application. I would suggest you define what you feel your requirements are (number of tables / rows, etc). Then we will be able to better determine if an Access database or SQL server is the best choice.

Sorry more questions than answers..