Access connectivity question

[pastafarian]

I would like to set up a central Access database and forms to be used by
about 8 people in an office over a LAN. Every NIC on the LAN has a dynamic
IP. We will code the forms ourselves, learning if we have to, but I want to
assess whether Access is appropriate for our needs.

What is the minimum I'm going to need to accomplish this? Do I need to set
up a server of some sort? Do I need to set something up on a static IP? I
would rather not, but what are my options?

 

[James A. Fortune]

I would like to set up a central Access database and forms to be used by
about 8 people in an office over a LAN. Every NIC on the LAN has a dynamic
IP. We will code the forms ourselves, learning if we have to, but I want to
assess whether Access is appropriate for our needs.

What is the minimum I'm going to need to accomplish this? Do I need to set
up a server of some sort? Do I need to set something up on a static IP? I
would rather not, but what are my options?

I support Access on a LAN where all the user's computers have dynamic
IP's. A well-designed Access database with eight or so simultaneous
users should work well. You should split your database into a front end
on each of the networked computers containing forms, queries, etc. and a
back end on a server containing the data tables. The server and any
networked printers should be on static IP's. You can specify a range of
IP's on the server that are to remain static. You'll be better off
forgetting about peer-to-peer, even with a data mdb residing on a
specified machine. The amount of network traffic goes up nonlinearly
with the number of peer-to-peer nodes. There seem to be other
performance enhancements with using a server as well. I converted one
customer from Access on a peer-to-peer network with about five users
over to a server based network and performance improved even for them.

James A. Fortune
(e-mail address removed)

Me: We'll just put your data up on the network and link to it from each
machine.

Customer: What's a network?

 

[Albert D. Kallal]

Ms-access is multi-user ready right out of the box.

Read my article here on using access in a multi-user environment...

http://www.members.shaw.ca/AlbertKallal/Articles/split/index.htm

 

[pastafarian]

Thank you James for your response. I have one question though: by "server"
you don't mean anything like MSSQL, do you? An ordinary work PC can serve up
the backend file? It just needs to be a PC with a static IP?

 

[pastafarian]

Wow, thanks for the article, it does shed a lot of light on the issue. And
thank you for answering my question.

 

[James A. Fortune]

Thank you James for your response. I have one question though: by "server"
you don't mean anything like MSSQL, do you? An ordinary work PC can serve up
the backend file? It just needs to be a PC with a static IP?

By "server" I mean a computer running Windows Server or linux. Although
an ordinary work PC can serve up the back end file, my point was to
avoid that configuration if at all possible. Note: If you need or want
a backup domain controller later I believe you need two of the same
kinds of server. After that, linux and Windows play nicely together.

James A. Fortune
(e-mail address removed)

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