[AccessD] Message not deliverable

Administrator administrator at it.glasgow.gov.uk
Tue Jan 28 18:03:17 CST 2003


Myke:

I had (have?) the same type of issue with a county office which was using a
split database, the FE residing one each user's desktop, the BE on their
main server, which was shared with other offices and could become quite
busy.  They had about 15 user input stations which were online and used
probably 80% of the day, then another 5 "public" stations which could only
view the data, and another 5 stations which came in via Terminal Server.
What would occasionally happen, without any warning or any consistancy,
someone would login to the database, and when they tried to lookup data,
they'd get the message "Unrecognized database format..." and eventually
everyone would be locked out of the database.  At this point, everyone had
to be kicked out of the database, repair/compact (access97, so it was a
double effort) before anyone could get back in.

Believe it or not, we've narrowed it down to a HARDWARE issue in their
network/server.  The corruption of the BE was being caused (we think at this
point) by improper exiting from the database by the clients.  Not caused by
the users themselves, but by the switches/hubs they had in their network
which were marginal and were causing some users to lose the network
connection to the BE, and when the JET engine finds one of the record flags
still set, it marks the database as corrupt and stops any more connections.
The MIS guy also had a timeout set on the Terminal Servers so that it would
terminate the connection after a certain period of time.  This might do the
same thing...exiting the database improperly.

He's moved around a lot of the connections so they now are not through a
single hub/switch (load balancing) and has done some upgrading of the TS so
it shuts down the Access program instead of terminating the connection.

We're down to about one corruption every two or three MONTHS...which is
better than once a week (we had it crash 3 times in 2 days at one
stretch...).

I hope this helps...or at least gives you some other avenues to view.

Greg Smith
Programmer/Trainer
weeden1949 at hotmail.com
----- Original Message -----
From: "Myke Myers" <mmmtbig at bellsouth.net>
To: <AccessD at databaseadvisors.com>
Sent: Friday, January 24, 2003 3:23 PM
Subject: [AccessD] Access Multi-User BE Problems


I've developed an application for a corporate compliance dept that has
grown considerably in the last 4 years. There are about 25 users going
in and out all day. Only a few are entering data. The frontend app is on
the user's PC, with linked tables to the backend (BE). The BE is on a
busy server that handles many other applications. Several users are
coming in via a VPN.

This database gets locked up and/or corrupted about once a week. This
has become a significant problem. Migrating to Sql Server is in the
distant future, but I need to improve the situation now.

I'm thinking of breaking out the data tables in the BE database into
separate databases, grouped by departmental function. I would retain the
one frontend application.

I hope that this would increase responsiveness, reduce down time and
data corruption, and help us identify who/what is causing problems. At
least if one BE database gets corrupted, it wouldn't take out all the
users while it gets fixed.

Anyone have insight to share? Thanks in advance, Myke



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