Forum Moderators: phranque
I run a website/online store via ASP and access, we have about 400 products and it works well. Our data transfer per month is around 1.5Gb But we are undergoing major expansion and launching a portal that will serve another additional 4-6 online stores that will probably add up to a combined produce database of 4000+ products. Is it safe for me to stay with an access database? I have read through a number of posts and the general drift was to mysql. Or should I run with access at present and then depending on our actual growth consider a change? Is changing and tranfering data from access to other databases doable on a fairly easy scale or a major task that I should tackle now before we grow?
I really appreciate the wonderful knowledge that is available on this forum for people like me who are on a steeeeeeeep learning curve. Thanks!
I'm not the most knowledgable person on this subject, but for what its worth:
Access can easily cope with 4000+ records. Someone even told me its good for up to 500,000 records. At any rate it can easily handle 10,000s of records in my experience. More to the point is whether it can handle all the requests your users make without slowing down the system. Also bear in mind the content within each record - if there are many fields or several memo fields it may slow things down a bit.
We were using Access Databases and found that they could cope with a lot of information and a fair amount of traffic. We bascially took the decision to remain with Access until the sites began to show signs of slowing - then we switched to MS Sql. I'm not sure that this was the most prudent method though :)
Switching from Access to MS Sql was not too difficult. MS Sql has a function allowing you to import structure and data from an Access Database (don't know about mysql). Aside from a few minor field-type and underscore issues which can be overcome, we found it straightforward.
One suggestion would be to decide whether it makes more sense for you to get everything else up and running ok first (less things to worry about at once) - or whether it would save time converting to sql first, before making lots more pages.
Thanks for the info. You said:
"One suggestion would be to decide whether it makes more sense for you to get everything else up and running ok first (less things to worry about at once) - or whether it would save time converting to sql first, before making lots more pages."
I think this is sound advice and will take it:-)
I would recommend mysql, but that is mostly because that is where my skills are. Unless you're out in extreme cases you should probably make the choice based on the human resources you have available. If your skills dictate access and access can solve the task, go with access. If you're better with mysql, use mysql.
