multiple users to acesss and edit Access database in a network mapped drive

Question

multiple users to acesss and edit Access database in a network mapped drive

Anonymous

I am setting up a database to capture Downtime for my tools in different cleanrooms in my company.

Each cleanroom have multiple tools and each tool has its own toll owner.

So i need to know if multiple tool owners can access the database store in a mapped network drive at the same time to key in downtime data without any Database corruption.

The tool owners will be using the Microsoft Acess 2013 Runtime to eter the downtime data.

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5 answers

Answer 1

While Access is designed for multi-user access out of the box. Experienced Access developers have determine that the optimum configuration is a back end containing just the tables which will be stored on a network share and a front end with everything else that will be stored on each users local drive.

You asked; "So i need to know if multiple tool owners can access the database store in a mapped network drive at the same time to key in downtime data without any Database corruption. " That is what Gina answered. The answer is a split database like I just described.

Access us very sensitive to network fluctuations so having users share a single database file is an invitation to data corruption.

Answer 2

Cyburazi,

Sorry for the confusion. I don't think you got your question(s) answered. I was in the same place as you a long time ago. So here's what I think you're asking to know:

You must split the database.

This is very very easy. You will have 2 databases when you are finished (one is the program and one is the data file). One is the actual data and will reside on the shared drive. I've done this exact thing with 4 databases for my company for the past 9 years w/o problems. The other will be the program (forms, queries, VBcode, etc. ) and will be distributed to each user.

The reason for this is that if you put the database as a whole (program and data) then when each user logs in, the database gets slower and slower and slower. If your server (shared drive) throughput is slow, you could actually crash the database. This would happen if you have dozens of people on it at the same time. I'm assuming you'd only have a few at a time. If each user has his own copy, then this slowing doesn't happen. It's the ideal situation. HOWEVER, each person must have MS Access installed on his/her computer to do this.

As for data corruption, that's always a problem with shared databases. You have little chance of that happening unless the database is small and only one table/set of records is used a lot. In that case you might want to enable record locking at the edit level. This is done by going to options then "this database" and select record locking edited records. My databases are huge and have not implemented this. I must admit that there are a handful of times over the past 10 years that a single field was corrupted because someone had edited something, didn't save or walk off the record and later someone else tried to edit the same record. That's the only reason ours gets corrupted. So I harp on folks to save and close the form (not the database) when done. Then it won't happen.

Hope this helps. - Kirk