What I meant by 'is Mircosoft aware' was to do with the issue that
sharing an Access database using wireless is likely to cause
corruption. I wasnt aware of this when I set it up and I'm sure
many others wont be either, so it would be better if they knew.
Out of interest does the corruption just affect the Access
database or the whole system it is on?
Of course Microsoft is aware, but there's no reason for them to give
any other advice than what they give now, and that is that you need
a reliable network connection. A *wire* connection can be flakey
enough to be unusable, but the way in which WiFi works, with
automatic roaming usually turned on, and radio interference from
non-WiFi devices constantly degrading the signal, WiFi is very
shaky.
It's like you had a short in your network cable and when you rocked
your chair back just so, it would disconnect. That unreliability of
a wired network causes just as many problems with Access as the
unreliable WiFi network, it's just that you have more control over
the wired network -- you're not sharing bandwidth with all your
neighbors' WiFi networks, nor with their baby monitors, microwaves,
cordless phones and cable TV repeaters. All of those are things that
are known to interfere with WiFi to one degree or another because
they either share the same unregulated radio spectrum in which WiFi
operates (baby monitors, TV repeaters, cordless phones), or they can
produce radio interference in the relevant frequency (microwave
ovens).
There is nothing MS can do to make a WiFi network sufficiently
reliable for Access to be safe. Nor can MS fix a defective wired
network -- these things are outside their purview.
But an unreliable network is well-documented in MS's Knowledge Base
as cause of problems with Access. This is just more of the same, but
substantially more severe than is usually encountered with wired
networks, which usually work or they don't. We all know perfectly
well from using it regularly that WiFi comes in and out all the
time. This is not a problem for buffered content (streaming media)
nor for most Internet-based activities (email, web browsing) because
the former is buffered precisely because there can be drops in the
signal, and the latter because the whole network is set up to retry.
The key difference with Access is bound data editing in stateful
forms combined with the requirements of a file-based multi-user
database system. Those things together make Access/Jet/ACE the
canary in the coal mine, revealing both major and minor network
insufficiencies.
