[AccessD] SQL and Access

Gustav Brock Gustav at cactus.dk
Tue Jun 20 03:18:56 CDT 2006


Hi Drew

Thanks for those observations. Very useful. Sometimes it is good to get the feet back on the ground.

/gustav

>>> DWUTKA at marlow.com 19-06-2006 19:45:45 >>>
Very common misconception when dealing with web stuff.

I listen to people over sell web servers/applications all the time.  Getting
a person/company to buy 10x the machine they really need.  

We run several web sites here.  9 times out of 10, if a website is slow,
it's due to the pipe, not the machine.  For example, we're behind a T1 here.
So if you hit any of our sites, it's limited by the speed of the T1.  Now
let's think about that.  If you are behind a T1, you are talking a 1.5
megabit/sec connection.  That is 1/60th the speed of a normal 100 megabit
LAN connection.  Do you need 4 processors, 20 gigs of Ram, with a RAID 10
SCSI setup to work on a 100 megabit network connection? Of course not, a
standard computer works just fine.

Same with web stuff.  When building a machine to serve as a webserver, the
only real consideration should be the RAM. (Because the more ram you have,
the more the webserver can cache).  

Of course I am talking about single site hosting.  If you are a hosting
company, and are going to host hundreds of websites on one machine (and have
a screaming connection to the internet back bone), then you obviously need a
heftier machine.

Take a look at our website: www.marlow.com .  No comments on the actual
'look' please, I'm not an artist, and my company is too busy to get a 'pro'
to make it look better.  But that site is running on a PIII 800 mhz desktop,
with 384 megs of RAM running Windows 2000 Server.  We get about 300 users a
day on our website.  Our site has a product database and a shopping cart,
both of which are run off of an Access 97 .mdb.  It's been running for
years, and has NEVER had a problem.  In fact, in the 3 or 4 years that it's
been running, the first and only 'issue' was a design complication that came
up a few weeks ago.  The way the products database worked, there was no way
to add non 'standard coolers' to the RoHS Product listing.  I could do it
directly in the database, but the guy that 'controls' the product listing
didn't have the ability in the 'control' pages I built for him.

I know this goes against a lot of what many IT departments say about Access.
But let's look at some facts.  If you have an .mdb running locally on a
webserver, then the .mdb is being used by one machine, and therefore only
has one user in it.  It doesn't matter if you have 1000 web users hit your
site at the same time, the webserver itself is going to only process them
one at a time, and therefore is only going to hit the .mdb as a single
process, it will just do that 1000 times in a row.  With the .mdb being
local, the process itself is screaming fast. (We are running a raid setup on
our webserver, faster HD access is definitely a plus).

So what kind of performance can an .mdb really handle?  Well, a webserver
can log all of it's activity.  Our webserver(s) all log their activity to an
.mdb.  They fill up relatively fast. (The webserver takes about a year to
fill, our intranet we just stopped logging, because it was filling up once a
month, and didn't really need the info).  That is the only true
consideration to think about when deciding if Access is right (other then
needing very tight security), the database size potential.  But a properly
designed shopping cart/ product database shouldn't be immense.  Our products
database is still under 3 megs.  Back to performance, we ran some
performance tests with our webservers, and we maxed our 100 mbit LAN
connections to them without the webserver or the .mdb's blinking.

Drew 



-----Original Message-----
From: Kath Pelletti [mailto:kp at sdsonline.net] 
Sent: Monday, June 19, 2006 1:22 AM
To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving
Subject: Re: [AccessD] SQL and Access

Drew - no, they don't have SQL Server. I thought that since this really
should be viewed as a web application that Access wouldn't be the best back
end for future growth. This company sells DVD's online - they are getting
into selling more and more products which will be available for downloading
to mobile phones etc. It sounds to me like I should plan for significant
growth, so that put me off Access. 

Kath



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