Locations of B/E files

[Ricoy-Chicago]

Everything I have works fine, but relatively slow. I have:

Access XP, 18 users (School records)
7 B/E files with several tables each
Staff users add data daily to only one B/E
In the other six data is added by Management once every 2-3 months, they
provide the data needed by staff (staff can see this data but they cannot
change it) to complete students records
All B/E are in the server

This is what I want to try:

Leave the Main B/E at the server
everytime the user logs in, a new copy of the other 6 B/E files are copied
to the computer hard drive
link all the F/E files to the B/E in the users' computers instead of being
linked to the server

I need some input before I proceed, there about 40 F/E files... Is this a
good idea, is it going to speed access time?

I inhereted this mess, and since it ain't broken...
any comments will help
thank you

 

[Dale Fye]

1. Why so many B/E files (I assume you mean individual .mdb files)? You
might want to consider consolidating some of these.

2. There are some advantages to keeping tables which are rarely changed on
a local computer. You could possibly check the LastUpdated property of each
of the tables in the Server and local B/E files to determine whether they
have been updated. If so, you delete the copy that is on the local database
and copy the one from the Server B/E file to the local B/E. LastUpdated
might not work for this (it only appears to track changes to the structure of
the table) so you might need to create your own custom database property to
track the date/time of the last change to each of the B/E tables.

3. Is this a good idea, will it speed things up? It depends on a variety
of circumstances, the most important of which are probably network speed and
amount of data in each of these tables. If you only have several hundred
records in each of these tables, probably not, but if you have tens of
thousands of records, then probably so. You also need to keep in mind that
the overhead of checking all of the BE tables and copying them to the local
computer could be a drawback, but if this only happens rarely, and you
provide some notification for your users that it is happening, the annoyance
can be minimal.

 

[Ricoy-Chicago]

1. Why so many B/E files (I assume you mean individual .mdb files)? You
might want to consider consolidating some of these.

yeah .. that's what I meant...

2. There are some advantages to keeping tables which are rarely changed on
a local computer. You could possibly check the LastUpdated property of each
of the tables in the Server and local B/E files to determine whether they
have been updated. If so, you delete the copy that is on the local database
and copy the one from the Server B/E file to the local B/E. LastUpdated
might not work for this (it only appears to track changes to the structure of
the table) so you might need to create your own custom database property to
track the date/time of the last change to each of the B/E tables.

3. Is this a good idea, will it speed things up? It depends on a variety
of circumstances, the most important of which are probably network speed and
amount of data in each of these tables. If you only have several hundred
records in each of these tables, probably not, but if you have tens of
thousands of records, then probably so. You also need to keep in mind that
the overhead of checking all of the BE tables and copying them to the local
computer could be a drawback, but if this only happens rarely, and you
provide some notification for your users that it is happening, the annoyance
can be minimal.

There are only a few hundred entries on them... however, the main mdb has
about 40K records...

I will keep looking... thank you