Access Front End with Azure SQL Backend?

[GPGeorge]

Spoiler: ETC

George, the application I tried the conversion with WAS optimized. It contained hundreds of thousands of rows and worked just fine on the LAN with 50+ concurrent users. I even recreated the views and stored procedures where they were used. With one user over the internet, It was like watching paint dry.

I don't doubt that you did fully optimize the database application regardless. However, my experience tells me that it's possible to get decent performance, but there are certainly other situations where that would not be the case.

I was asked one time to move an Access accdb to Azure because two partners were moving to different states. One in the Michigan and one in Florida. It was a dog, but the main form loaded three or four subforms simultaneously, each with up to 5 or 6 combo boxes. That's a known source of performance problems. I managed to squeeze some improvement out of it by lazy loading subforms and combo boxes on subforms, but it really never was acceptable.

 

[GPGeorge]

You say you've had success. I don't doubt it. Was the client running his own Azure cloud or was he using a third party?

In that case, it was actually an Access Web App SQL Azure database, which was a limited version of SQL Azure. However, it only cost ~$5.00 a month. If I had it to do again, I would have argued for a full Azure database that could have been scaled up, but sometimes people are reluctant to invest more than they have to . You get what you pay for, slower performance lower cost tend to be positively correlated.

 

[Minty]

We use Microsoft hosted Azure SQL databases, the costs are nothing like $5000 a month. George wrote $5
Even on an expensive high-performance plan, they are only about £100 a month, and normally less.
Everything connects via ODBC.

If you need a Managed SQL instance that is a more expensive option.

Considering the inbuilt back-up and uptime that is 99.99% (We've never had an outage in 5 years) I think it's cheap.

 

[GPGeorge]

We use Microsoft hosted Azure SQL databases, the costs are nothing like $5000 a month. George wrote $5
Even on an expensive high-performance plan, they are only about £100 a month, and normally less.
Everything connects via ODBC.

If you need a Managed SQL instance that is a more expensive option.

Considering the inbuilt back-up and uptime that is 99.99% (We've never had an outage in 5 years) I think it's cheap.

That $5.00 a month was a now-deprecated offering supporting the Access Web App which was dropped in 2016. I have long suspected that one of the reasons for that was people could invest a few dollars a month and create multiple small SQL Azure databases!

 

[Minty]

@GPGeorge I did think that was cheap!

We are about to up our elastic pool to the next tier but that gives you a lot of computing power, and is shared between about 25 databases.
Some are tiny, some have 100,000's of records. The cost per database is relatively small.

We manage it for our clients, but they have complete access to the data if they want it.