Administrator
administrator at it.glasgow.gov.uk
Wed Jan 29 02:52:46 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 This list sponsored by Database Advisors Inc., a worldwide association of database developers. Visit http://www.DatabaseAdvisors.com, the database developers' list portal and support site. _______________________________________________ AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd _______________________________________________ AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd _______________________________________________ AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd