Hold the phone! Am I delusional?

[johngalt47]

I have not used Access in many years and even then it was not developing an application. However, as I mentioned in my introduction, I have worked with other databases for about 30 years.

Anyway....I assumed that an Access application could be used by multiple users simultaneously. I thought it had record locking, not file locking.

Is that incorrect?

 

[sneuberg]

No your assumption is correct. What is making you question it?

 

[pbaldy]

There are settings that will make it appear "file locking". You also need to split it to properly handle multiple users. Lots of info out there, here's one link:

http://allenbrowne.com/ser-01.html

 

[johngalt47]

I was watching a tutorial on YouTube about migrating to SQL Server and what I understood from the guy was that it was not possible to have a multi-user Access application. This is a small company for which I am creating this application. At this point there will be at most 10 concurrent users.

 

[pbaldy]

He was...wrong. Multiple users shouldn't share the same copy of the file, but that's what the splitting I mentioned gets around. Access is probably used in multi-user scenarios more often than not.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

I personally managed an all-Access (FE & BE) database for the Navy that had between 30 and 40 users, usually topped out at 9 simultaneous users simply because they were on different schedules and such (some night shift, some weekend shifts, some traditional shift...). As long as the network connection to the shared BE file is solid, and as long as you don't actively TRY to screw things up, you hardly EVER have a problem.

I assured (by code in the FE) that if you tried to run the shared copy, it would kick you out pronto. It was able to see its own path AND the path to its back-end files, so could compare. Other than giving private FE copies to each user (in order to isolate FE file locking), assuring proper file permissions (MODIFY class on the BE file's folder), and assuring a solid network connection for the BE, there is nothing else you need to do for Access to work multi-user just fine.

Note that there MIGHT be something else to do for your corporate IT requirements, but that has nothing to do with Access. Remember, I did this for the U.S. Navy and trust me, THEY had IT and security requirements coming out the wazoo!

 

[gemma-the-husky]

access can certainly be used by multiple users simultaneously,

Also, by default, it uses no record locking - actually a mechanism called optimistic locking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimistic_concurrency_control