Arthur Fuller
fuller.artful at gmail.com
Thu Nov 6 12:18:08 CST 2014
I'm frankly a bit stunned by your numbers. Are you talking about the FE or the BE? Several Access FEs I've written address MS-SQL or MySQL BEs over 50GB in size, running on clusters. In that situation, I bind forms to stored procedures and find performance acceptable. Mind you, I learned a significant lesson long ago, which I call the Sally Rand Principle -- named for a famous American stripper, whose motto was, "Show them just a little more at a time, to pique their interest." More concrete; I would for example present a list of sales orders, bound to an SP that selected orders in the past 30 days, but with buttons on the form's header to switch to 60/90/120 days. All that required was simple code to pass a different parameter to the SP. Dead simple, really; it gave the users everything they wanted most of the time, and everything available, in chunks, depending on the ambition of their question at the moment. I also learned, relatively early on into these adventures, and decided way back when to separate reports into a second app that did nothing but report. And finally, I learned an approach from Jim Dettman that I took very seriously. Before I met him, I had the bad habit of rolling everything into a single massive Access app. But Jim presented another approach completely. and his wisdom inspired me to rethink my whole approach to Access development. Instead of one massive app that did everything but the dishes, Jim had about 30 apps that each did exactly one thing, and their AutoExec code fired a procedure and as soon as it was complete, exited. I had never even considered that approach before encountering Jim's apps. The huge gain in Jim's approach is the ability to schedule apps using Windows Scheduler. Some reports need to run once a day at a particular time; others are weekly, and others month-end; and a few others quarterly or annually. The result is that the user sees a lot of shortuts but can drag them into meaningful groups based on frequency of use and act accordingly -- or, even better, just schedule these tiny programs and forget about it. I thank Jim for that profound insight. Arthur