Wan

[Exodus]

My office is migrating its servers from LAN to WAN. My app is the typical FE BE and has been in use since 2005 with no corruption issues at all. The most users that are connected is 10. My question is what issues will I encounter. Right now we have a mix of office XP and 2010. With everything going 2010 soon.

 

[Pat Hartman]

Depending on the speed of your WAN and the size of your Access tables, you may find that your app becomes too slow to use. If that happens, you'll need to switch to SQL Server where you have more control over how much data is pulled over the network.

The biggest problem with going from Jet/ACE to SQL Server is that in order to take advantage of SQL Server's ability to send just requested data back to your app, is that you'll need to modify your forms to restrict the data they request. It is quite common for Access apps to be built on forms bound directly to tables or unqualified queries. That defeats the entire purpose of using SQL Server. You'll need to change the RecordSources of your forms to queries with rigid selection criteria to bring down the minimum set of data possible.

 

[Exodus]

Hi Pat thanks for your reply. going to SQL would definitely be a problem not only on the up sizing but also with my internal IT section. One of my biggest concerns is back end corruption. What are best plan of attacks to limit this? besides the normal daily back ups. What about replicas will that help? If so how to implement?

 

[Simon_MT]

You could look at a Terminal Server.

Simon

 

[Pat Hartman]

Access simply does not perform well over a WAN. The connection speeds are too slow and Access shuffles around too much data. WAN speeds are easily just 10% of LAN speeds. That's enough to seriously slow down an application. Short of converting to SQL Server, you could use Terminal Services as Simon suggested or Citrix which sits on top of Terminal Services. Since TS/Citrix run on the server and only send "pictures" to the user, they don't suffer from the delays of a WAN but they are both expensive to set up and could require dedicated hardware. The SQL Server solution will be cheaper and be a good middle ground.