Forum Moderators: open
If i understand the second question corectly, you are asking about how much the hosting company will charge if you switch to SQL? I know of a couple of hosts that charges $25 - $30 a year, but it varies from one host to another.
You get what you pay for in terms of service.
- Not really multi-user, so don't complain if it breaks with some concurrent users ;-)
- No Stored procedures (although i heard it's in the pipeline)
- No performance
- I really miss SQL Server's advanced features like full-text indexing, but that just because i need them a lot for my projects.
Summary: for a simple Data driven website with a few hundred hits per day, it's just fine.
the Sql Server option would propably cost you about 40 euro's extra (per month) if you want to do it right
on a sidenode: I hear good things about MSDE
As long as you don't ever need to write to the database fro mthe web, Access will be fine.
But if you have hopes of developing some type of application, then you'll need SQL or another DB.
Look into mySQL as well.
The other thing to note is that an Access database does not deal well with improper shutdown. So if the web server crashes at the wrong moment (during a write to the database) and has to be rebooted, then the database must be checked out for corruption before it can be used again. You can program that into the global.asa, or do it by hand.
mySQL
SQL Server
Oracle
IBM DB2
With mySQL being at the bottom because it lacks a lot of features that people using expensive SQL data engines take for granted, the one I find all the time is that you can't do a sub-select within IN() statement...
That said it's cheap & fast and reliable enough which for most people is the right combination.
For what it's worth, everything in that list should support ANSI compatible SQL statements which means that in theory the SQL syntax you use on one engine should work on all others with little or no changes (that's the theory at least).
-Tony
For a regular desktop app I would consider using Access as the db but as it's not really a pure database engine designed from the ground up to be multi-user - so when you attempt to use it in that way it can end horribly, and for a web-app having stuff end horribly is a very bad thing indeed...
...and you're right - going from a hardcore SQL session to an Access query is a bit of a shock to the system at times because of those "oddities".
- Tony