There's no doubt about that. But if you were going to decide to use a given
backend, the assumption is most likely that you aren't only going to be
firing select statements. Throw 5 users updating 20 times at MSDE and it
won't blink. Throw 50 users at it and it won't. So if you use MSDE, then
the only cost as compared to using Access is installation and that isn't
even a real issue once you learn how to use the installers. But if you use
Access, the only time you'll find out it won't handle the load is after it's
too late to do something about it feasably in that you have to write code
first even to test this. And I've seen access buckle under a 5 user
scenario with moderate/heavy usage. I've seen the same with a decent load
on 10 users. It's not a real client server database so using it as such
just isn't a good idea in general. I don't doubt you can get it to work
with 10 users or even 20, but if the load changes, the cost of being wrong
may be quite heavy.