concurrency clarifications

rob1234

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I'm redoing a patient info database for a healthcare facility (right now it's a flat Filemaker db with 869 fields and 4000 records) and I had pretty much decided to move it over to access but I was talking to one of the database guys at the local University and he mentioned that if there is going to be more than one user editing data that I shouldn't use access and should use mysql instead. Then after talking to a different guy and reading through this forum it seems that sharing the database shouldn't be a problem but I just wanted to get a few clarifications first.

There are only 5 or 6 people that would be accessing the database and I doubt that they will be accessing the same records at the same time very often. Basically, what I want to know is can I setup the db with access so that those 5 or 6 people can access it whenever they want and add and change records. I'm not familiar yet with how splitting the db works but could I just put the db file on the network and they could just open it in access and make whatever changes or do I have to split it. Thanks for any advise.
 
The simple answer is absolutely yes! All users will need their own copy of Access and their own copy of your FrontEnd. The BackEnd only contains tables and relationships and the FrontEnd has everything else. This method makes modifications simple; just replace everyone's FrontEnd since the data is in the BackEnd. There are even automation tools that makes keeping everyone on the latest FrontEnd a snap.
 
Great. Access it is then.
 
869 fields
Yikes! You have your work cut out for you to normalize the schema. Don't forget to define relationships and enforce referential integrity.
 
I know. I'm not looking forward to it. One good thing is 449 of the fields are calculations so I can get rid of most of those. It's a huge mess though. There's stupid things like a study number field and another field called study number header which is a calculation that is just "=study number" and it's not even used anywhere that I can find.
 

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