Access 97 Size Restrictions and Limitations

  • Thread starter Thread starter Emma Ruefli
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E

Emma Ruefli

Is anyone able to tell me what the limits are for Access
97 before instability starts to creep in.

Some of our data has been lost (seemingly) inexplicably
over the past couple of weeks and I am wondering whether
it is possible for the system to be unstable due to its
size. The database is currently 75MB when compacted and
holds about 180,000 client records and 80,000 company
records.

Any help would be appreciated?
Cheers
Emma Ruefli
 
Max db size for Access 97 is 1GB. Number of records is not specified.

See specifications in Access help for more stats.

If you are losing data, there is an entirely diffeerent problem at hand.
 
Emma Ruefli said:
Is anyone able to tell me what the limits are for Access
97 before instability starts to creep in.

Some of our data has been lost (seemingly) inexplicably
over the past couple of weeks and I am wondering whether
it is possible for the system to be unstable due to its
size. The database is currently 75MB when compacted and
holds about 180,000 client records and 80,000 company
records.
Click to expand...

This is quite acceptable. A clients MDB is currently 220-250Mb.

It is quite unusual to inexplicably lose data. While corruption
does happen it's been my experience that you know about it immediately
and that you seldom lose data. Unless you have to go to back.

I wonder if if you have cascade update/delete's enable and folks are
going into the tables directly. Or if they are going into the tables
directly and deleting records. Which they shouldn't be of course.

What you could do is write a routine which counts the number of
records in all the tables and keep track of this on a daily basis.
Looking for any drops from day to day of course.

Tony
--
Tony Toews, Microsoft Access MVP
Please respond only in the newsgroups so that others can
read the entire thread of messages.
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http://www.granite.ab.ca/accsmstr.htm
 
It's been our experience that when we start getting up to about 100 mb
is when we first start seeing the instability. For some databases, by
the time they got up to about 200 mb, the instability got to be a
frequent and persistant problem. Microsoft may say the max size is 1
gb, but I think this is more of a theoretical than a practical limit.
I'm sure there are a great many factors which come into play as to
when or if you start seeing problems. We eventually had no choice but
to migrate the data to SQL.
 
I don't have anything against SQL Server, as long as you're prepared to take
on the maintenance, which is non-trivial. But before you do anything
drastic, you might want to try a couple of things -- first, count your
records, as Tony suggested, and second, test your network cards. It's never
been explained to my satisfaction, but Access does seem to be sensitive to
flaky Ethernet cards.

HTH

--
Rebecca Riordan, MVP

Designing Relational Database Systems
Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Programming Step by Step
Microsoft ADO.NET Step by Step

http://www.microsoft.com/mspress

Blessed are they who can laugh at themselves,
for they shall never cease to be amused...
 
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