[AccessD] Article: "How to ‘Hybridize’ your MS Access Database In Office 365 Azure Database"

Hi Arthur

Min you, I wrote "many", not "all". 

We support a project/accounting application (in three modules, by the way, since version 1 in Access 2.0(!)). No client (small businesses) has ever passed the 250 MB mark for mdb file size after more than ten years of service. So for a startup, 1 GB database is enough.
As Shamil mentions, should you grow beyond this, hook up with a separate Azure SQL Server database which you won't outgrow just like that.

/gustav

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Fra: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com <accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com> på vegne af Arthur Fuller <fuller.artful at gmail.com>
Sendt: 6. november 2014 19:18
Til: Access Developers discussion and problem solving
Emne: Re: [AccessD]     Article: "How to ‘Hybridize’ your MS Access Database In Office 365 Azure Database"

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