When is my Access db to large?

[saXen]

Hi there. Im running this website www.elefun.net for my company. It is an C# .net solution.

Most of the website/product information and user information is based on an Access db. Ive got some negative comments about Access dbs like:

1. Access dbs are bad and should not be used.
2. Access do not handle large dbs well.

So Ive been considering to change to an SQL db for I while, but I really dont know if its nesessary. My Access db is at the moment about 9MB. My questions are:

3. Is it OK to use acces dbs for this kind of solutions?
4. Does Access dbs get to large. If they do? When are they to large? 10MB, 100MB, 1GB. I really dont have any clue.
5. Is converting from an Access to an SQL db hard? Ive worked some with both kinds of dbs, but never tried converting between them. Will I have to do many changes in my solution, or will changing the db connection be it?

 

[penfold69]

1. Access DBs have a place, but for a large-scale deployment, they are bad
2. Access DBs have a maximum filesize of 2GB, or thereabouts.
3. If your current database is 9MB, you need to calculate how long it will be before you hit the 2GB limit. Once you hit this limit, your application will crash when attempting to insert or modify records.
4. Converting should be very simple, if you are converting up to SQL server. If you are converting to other types of database server, then ymmv.

B.

 

[VagabondSW]

3. Is it OK to use acces dbs for this kind of solutions?
4. Does Access dbs get to large. If they do? When are they to large? 10MB, 100MB, 1GB. I really dont have any clue.
5. Is converting from an Access to an SQL db hard? Ive worked some with both kinds of dbs, but never tried converting between them. Will I have to do many changes in my solution, or will changing the db connection be it?

Well, Ive used Access Databases that were quite large. I did a project for the County of San Diego that was using a Acess Databases that would often exceed 500MB in size. I never had a problem...

However, my application was the ONLY application reading from and writing to these database files and all on a single-thread. Had the database access shifted to multi-user or multi-threaded, I would have abandoned Access in a heartbeat.

So, if all youre doing is reading data from the Access database and feeding it to your presentation layer, then I think your database could get quite large before you need to worry about it. On the other hand, if the visitors to your site are causing data to be written to your database or information in the database to be updated, then I would start planning to upgrade to something different.

There are several inexpensive alternatives to Microsoft Access. The ones I know of are MySQL and the SQL Express. Unfortunately, I have used neither so I can offer no comments about them.