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  • Thread starter Thread starter Greg Staley
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Greg Staley

How can I set an Access program / form to allow multiple users at the same
time?

Greg Staley
 
Greg Staley said:
How can I set an Access program / form to allow multiple users at the same
time?
Click to expand...

Technically Access is multi-user right out of the box with no need for you to do
anything special except make sure that users open the file in shared mode rather than
exclusive mode. However; in practice, just throwing the MDB into a network share and
pointing all users at it is not recommended. It will perform badly and even more
important it will suffer more corruption problems.

What is recommended is that the application be split into two files, a back end file
with just the tables, and a front end file with everything else. The back end is
then linked to the front end so that the front end works essentially the same as
before only using the links instead of local tables. In this arrangement you can
create as many copies of the front end file as you want and give each user one to
store on their local disk. It is best then to create the links by going through
Network Neighborhood - Entire Network so that a UNC path is used for the links rather
than a mapped drive letter. This way the link path is the same no matter where you
place the front end file.

There are other issues involved in *optimizing* an Access app for multiple users as
far as concurrency and performance is concerned, but that is a larger topic than I
want to cover in a newsnet posting.
 
Greg-

Well, you *could* just put your desktop database file (.mdb) on a network
share and let multiple users have access to it, but that's not a good idea.
Unless you want to upsize to an Access project file and SQL Server, the most
common method is to split the application - put all your tables in one .mdb
file (the "data" database) and all your queries, forms, reports, macros, and
modules in another (the "code" database). Put your "data" database on a
network server share. Use linked tables in your "code" database to link the
application to the data and give each user their own copy of the "code."
You have to be careful to set up the linked tables so that each user's
"code" database can find the "data" database on the share.

--
John Viescas, author
"Microsoft Office Access 2003 Inside Out" (coming soon)
"Running Microsoft Access 2000"
"SQL Queries for Mere Mortals"
http://www.viescas.com/
(Microsoft Access MVP since 1993)
 
What are the reasons for doing this? More curious than anything. I've
created small databases (used by 5 people or so) and never really had a
problem outside of record locking issues and I don't think that would be
solved by having a separate code and data database (or would it?)

Thanks!
-Mark
 
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