Access can handle vast numbers of records. As you accumulate more and more
records, you may experience performance degradation due to a number of
factors: the hardware environment, the software environment, and the
requirements, design, and implementation of your database. The best
collection of information and links on Access multiuser performance that I
know about is MVP Tony Toews' site
http://www.granite.ab.ca.
And, because of the design and implementation of Access itself, at some
point, you may well discover that you need to convert to using the Access
front end to access the data via a server database, such as Microsoft SQL
Server (but, you can use any ODBC-compliant database). I have one
acquaintance who has a business analyzing data for customers... he's no
slouch with Access, but discovered that despite all his performance tweaks,
it was taking most of the month to process all his clients' data. He now has
the only one-workstation network I know about using a four-processor server
running full Microsoft SQL Server -- that same client load is processed in a
few hours and he was, thus, able to expand his client base significantly.
But, until you experience noticeable performance degradation _after_
following all the suggestions at Tony's site, you don't need to consider
moving to a server database for performance. I have done work on much
smaller databases with rather small user audiences, however, that had been
moved to server databases because they were mission-critical and required
the reliability and recoverability that only a heavy-duty,
industrial-strength server database can provide.
Larry Linson
Microsoft Access MVP
