Sharing MS-Access Databases, Efficiently?

codewizard asks: "Ours is a bank and we have a bunch of MS-Access databases(>50) which are being used by around 50 users around the globe on a daily basis. The set of databases are stored on a SAMBA share and each user accesses from the mapped drive. As expected, sharing conflicts arise and multiple users are unable to access at the same time. So, we proposed having multiple folders on SAMBA each of which would have all the databases and the users logon script would determine where their mapped drive points to. This led to synchronisation issues (when a change is required in one of the master databases, we need to manually synchronise all other folders) and increase in storage size in SAMBA. Anyone have any other ideas on how you would have gone about sharing these MS-Access databases?"

Comments

Pedantic correction...

[leonbrooks]

It's not made for multi-user access

Despite this, it can be made to run reasonably efficiently and reliably if you know how. I have a mate (Hi, Jeremy!) who does this regularly, and other things like rewrite the GDA (no shit, he did this) on his iPaq to not do stupidly pointless transforms, and to use integer arthmetic. The result is an eye-opening iPaq that displays maps in realtime instead of at plotter speeds.

Nevertheless, for your average gonzo it's too much work. And Microsoft products are a dead end anyway. As practically everyone else is saying, whack up an ODBC interface and hide whatever you like behind it by way of a real database. If you can make it web-based, that's an additional layer of useful abstraction that allows to to hotswap even more technologies.

No doubt I'll get a /. lameness filter message about too many syllables when I press this button... (-: