MS Access Rig

[Jkusuda]

I was wondering if anyone might have a suggestion as to what the best hardware configuration would be for MS Access development. I'm assuming that maximizing ram is important.

My main question revolves around which processor would be best. There are some budget constraints but I was curious which processor (dual core xeon, dual core opteron, or athlon x2 line) would perform the best.

Table sizes are rather large and the queries can take some time to process.

Thanks,

James

[Darkness Productions]

Any reason why this wouldn't be done on a 'real' SQL machine?

[Jkusuda]

Software decision isn't up to me. I was just presented with the question on hardware.

[Petey]

I can't think of any benchmarks that only test MS Access.

The only relevant benchmarks I can think of using are the Ziff Davies Winstone 2004 and the BAPCO SYSmark 2004 Office. They are more general test than you would want for a dedicated MS Access box but they should give you some comparators.

A search at the AMD multicore site will find AMD's own results for each of their chipsets.

And once you have picked your chipset, strap as much memory as you can on the box, compact the databases regularly and don't let a single Access database get bigger than 1GB (partition big tables across many Access databases).

Petey

[Darkness Productions]

... don't let a single Access database get bigger than 1GB ...

This is only true in older versions of Access. Access 2003 (and more specifically, Access 2007) removed the 1GB limitation on filesize. Access 2003 supports up to 4GB, and Access 2007 supports up to Windows filesize limits.

[Petey]

This is only true in older versions of Access. Access 2003 (and more specifically, Access 2007) removed the 1GB limitation on filesize. Access 2003 supports up to 4GB, and Access 2007 supports up to Windows filesize limits.

I know the filesystem limits have been progressively raised but I'm erring on the side of caution here as I don't know how the query optimiser performs on databases over 1Gb. Did MS revamp this when they upped the filesystem limits or do queries on very large databases run like 'pigs on stilts'?

When all is said and done, 1 Gb is still a hell of a lot of data to hold in MS Access.

[Mustard]

When all is said and done, 1 Gb is still a hell of a lot of data to hold in MS Access.

From the professional end of it I totally agree with you. Access wasn't brought out to compete against MS's database flagship, SQL. You start getting very involved querys and it's gonna run slower than dried snot.