is access 2007 can work good with 30 users parallel

Question

hi

is access 2007 can work good with 30 users parallel through my C# program ?

thank's in advance

Answer 1

Access is not very good for concurrent use. I have seen recommendation of a maximum of 10 people at one time.

To be honest, it depends on how these users are working and the load on it, however, it is not designed for such use (it is designed to be a desktop databasew not an enterprise database) so may fail under such usage. Use a database designed for you scenario - something like MySql or SQL Server Express, if you want to avoid extra costs.

See this article on 15seconds for a discussion on the suitability (or lack thereof) of access to concurrent usage.

Answer 2

I never did it with 2007, but I had problems in the past with the XP version and only 3 users working 8 hours a day.

So, based in my previous experience, try to avoid it. Make your customer to change their requirement will be easier than the problems derived from to use Access in a paralell enviroment. After all, also based in my experience... your customer will be changing their requirements almost every week! :D

May the Force be with you.

Answer 3

The Jet and ACE database engines can support 255 users, not just 255 concurrent connections. This is because the standard for interaction with a Jet/ACE data store is a single connection for each user, opened and then re-used throughout the session. However, it definitely is the case that under normal usage Jet/ACE may open more than one connection per user, so 255 is not even a reliable theoretical limit.

Jet/ACE interacts with a data file, and maintains locking via its locking file (*.LDB). Contention for the data file and the LDB file can easily overwhelm the file system's ability to keep up, so in general, the practical limit on number of users is much lower than the 255 theoretical limit (you'll note that 255 is one less than a power of 2, hint, hint).

In real-world scenarios, a properly designed Access application with a Jet/ACE data store running on a reliable network and stored on a server with a native Windows file system can be quite stable into the 20-30 users range. But it depends on what those users are doing. The more that are read-only, the higher the number of simultaneous users that can be supported.

Experienced Access developers report engineering apps to work with as many as 100 simultaneous users, but at that point, you basically have to rewrite as an unbound app, and then you're giving up most of the advantages of Access as front end in order to nurse along a back end that is better used with a smaller user population.

My basic rule is that any time a user population reaches 15 simultaneous users, I start talking to the client about upsizing to SQL Server, not because it's required, but because they need to get used to the idea that as usage grows, they're going to need to upsize. Whether that happens at 15 users or 20 or 30 depends on the nature of the particular app. As I said above, if many of the users are read-only for most of their session, you have more headroom than if everybody is adding/updating records most of the time.

Given that a C# app is going to be an unbound app, I wouldn't think that 30 users should be terribly problematic, but I'm not a C# programmer. If it's new development and there's any possibility that the user population will grow beyond 30 users, it just seems like a no-brainer to me to build with a server back end instead of with Jet/ACE.