Should I use MySQL

[Robin Ball]

My company has developed a number of commercial applications using MS Access. We always have a user interface that is seperate from the master data databases that only stores tables / basic relationships. Largest system produced deliverfdy notes and invoices for £1 million worth of prepared vegetable food sales in a single week, another has 50,000 farmers and trades agricultural quotas between the farmers. Most of our systems are run on small single server networks (often MS SBS) with maybe as many as 30 users.

We have for a long time considered converting the back end databases to MS SQL server, retaining the MS Access front ends. We have to date found that, used properly, MS Access can handle significant business applications. Perfmance with larger data sets is however a key issue.

Would there be any performance benefit in retaining front ends pretty much as is in MS Access and converting the data to MySQL. Appreciate that there are a number of data type and prmary key issues to address. Presumably once in MS Access using ODBC then stacked queries will still work as they do where the back end data is held in MS Access. Once converted and running using existing front end logic and rules we could then presumably start to gain additional performance benefits by gradual introduction of server side elements.

Thanks in anticipation