I know we should use SQL Server for databasing but I have a low traffic website and don't feel like paying for SQL Server. Instead, I want to MS Access. Is Access reliable? Two years ago, I used Access and the database always becomes corrupt. Do you know if Access corruption is still a problem? Perhaps in the last two years, Microsoft would have done something to solve the problem.

Thanks for your input.

MS Access is just fine so long as you don't have many simultaneous connections to the DB. Say 25 max???

May I suggest you look into mySQL (www.mysql.org). It’s open source, FREE and super FAST!

If you are running a low-traffic site with less visitors Access 2000 would be OK to use...but I wouldn't suggest any forums based on Access: more than 20 users updating at the same time will still cause some problems :)

Access is a single user database. Only one person can access a peice of data at a time. Aside from that, Access is slow.
MySQL is free (or cheap if you are looking for a host), very fast, and scalable.
There is a cost however, MC Access is super easy as far as databasing goes. You need to know at least a moderate amount of SQL to use MySQL, and there are some things that it doesn't have yet, like nested queries. I don't ever plan on going Microsoft for any of their database platforms barring some huge jump in performance from their new releases. Performance is not what it should be on any of them (including SQL Server) and there are limitations.
I'll probably always use MySQL, occasionally Postgress if I need to, and if I am ever lucky enough to have a client with the duckets...... Oracle. Oracle is the best database platform out there. Expensive as all get out, but it is goot!

Access database as in flatfile?

Only one person can access a peice of data at a time. It can handle more than one concurrent user at a time. If you are using it on a low volume site (say less than 10 concurrent users) and the database is less than a few 10 MB in size, you should be ok. On a side note, MS has stopped including the JET driver (which is used to communcate to Access databases) in all versions of MDAC and is trying to get users to switch to MSDE.

Hope that helps!

I would consider mySQL but I need Windows hosting.

Greetings shiphq:

Here are the problems inherit in Microsoft Access as a database engine:

1. Microsoft Access has a limit of approximately 25 simultaneous connections per Microsoft Access Database.

2. The ODBC driver for Microsoft Access limits the number of simultaneous connections to a given server. I believe the limit is 256.

This means even if your application only needs 5 simultaneous connections, if you are in a shared hosting environment, you may have cases where 0 connections are available for yout o use.

3. Microsoft Access was built to be a desktop database engine. It is not a client server engine, and using it on any network (the Internet is the largest distributed network in the world) will result in very poor performance.

4. Most hosting providers backup systems will not (READ WILL NOT) backup your Microsoft Access database if it is in use by anyone. This means that unless you take special measures to ensure that no one is accessing the database during the time frame (READ FRAME -- SPAN OF TIME), your database will not be backed up by your hosting provider.

Thank you.

shiphq,

There are Windows hosts that are running mySQL, either in the windows format or on a linux box in their network.

You can access mySQL through ADO using the myODBC driver, pretty much like you would connect to Access through ADO. There are a few gotchas that are outlined in the myODBC documentation, but for the most part that are not overly hindering.

Best thing to do, if you have a development box (even Win2k Pro), is to download mySQL for Windows and myODBC and give them a try. From an application standpoint we have found it to be very fast, and very stable.

Good Luck,

shiphq:

MySQL runs quite nicely on Windows. That's where we're running it! And BTW: as soon as we migrated from Access DB's to MySQL DB's (even for our very small, low volume db's) more than half of our server errors went away.