Max size of a useable Access-database ?

Kind of depends upon the data base and how it's used. All things being equal, a small data base that undergoes a lot of adds and deletes will generally perform worse than a larger db that's relatively static.

Remember that access is just a flat file. Adds are put onto the end of the file and deletes are just flagged as deleted - not physically removed. This results in indexes and data being interspersed all over the end of the file - with corresponding lag times as access tries to figure who points at what and where the who and what are located.

Doing a periodic compact and repair rewrites the flat file in an organized fashion.

Acess is loaded into memory for each user each time it's used. You only have a finite amount of memory available before you start paging memory to disk, so both size and numbers of users can impact the performance.

Also, the more access db's that are being used, the slower the performance of each - particularly if your using ODBC connections.


Edited by dpyers - 17 November 2006 at 1:03am