Alpha Software Mobile Development Tools:   Alpha Anywhere    |   Alpha TransForm subscribe to our YouTube Channel  Follow Us on LinkedIn  Follow Us on Twitter  Follow Us on Facebook

Announcement

Collapse

The Alpha Software Forum Participation Guidelines

The Alpha Software Forum is a free forum created for Alpha Software Developer Community to ask for help, exchange ideas, and share solutions. Alpha Software strives to create an environment where all members of the community can feel safe to participate. In order to ensure the Alpha Software Forum is a place where all feel welcome, forum participants are expected to behave as follows:
  • Be professional in your conduct
  • Be kind to others
  • Be constructive when giving feedback
  • Be open to new ideas and suggestions
  • Stay on topic


Be sure all comments and threads you post are respectful. Posts that contain any of the following content will be considered a violation of your agreement as a member of the Alpha Software Forum Community and will be moderated:
  • Spam.
  • Vulgar language.
  • Quotes from private conversations without permission, including pricing and other sales related discussions.
  • Personal attacks, insults, or subtle put-downs.
  • Harassment, bullying, threatening, mocking, shaming, or deriding anyone.
  • Sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, or otherwise discriminatory jokes and language.
  • Sexually explicit or violent material, links, or language.
  • Pirated, hacked, or copyright-infringing material.
  • Encouraging of others to engage in the above behaviors.


If a thread or post is found to contain any of the content outlined above, a moderator may choose to take one of the following actions:
  • Remove the Post or Thread - the content is removed from the forum.
  • Place the User in Moderation - all posts and new threads must be approved by a moderator before they are posted.
  • Temporarily Ban the User - user is banned from forum for a period of time.
  • Permanently Ban the User - user is permanently banned from the forum.


Moderators may also rename posts and threads if they are too generic or do not property reflect the content.

Moderators may move threads if they have been posted in the incorrect forum.

Threads/Posts questioning specific moderator decisions or actions (such as "why was a user banned?") are not allowed and will be removed.

The owners of Alpha Software Corporation (Forum Owner) reserve the right to remove, edit, move, or close any thread for any reason; or ban any forum member without notice, reason, or explanation.

Community members are encouraged to click the "Report Post" icon in the lower left of a given post if they feel the post is in violation of the rules. This will alert the Moderators to take a look.

Alpha Software Corporation may amend the guidelines from time to time and may also vary the procedures it sets out where appropriate in a particular case. Your agreement to comply with the guidelines will be deemed agreement to any changes to it.



Bonus TIPS for Successful Posting

Try a Search First
It is highly recommended that a Search be done on your topic before posting, as many questions have been answered in prior posts. As with any search engine, the shorter the search term, the more "hits" will be returned, but the more specific the search term is, the greater the relevance of those "hits". Searching for "table" might well return every message on the board while "tablesum" would greatly restrict the number of messages returned.

When you do post
First, make sure you are posting your question in the correct forum. For example, if you post an issue regarding Desktop applications on the Mobile & Browser Applications board , not only will your question not be seen by the appropriate audience, it may also be removed or relocated.

The more detail you provide about your problem or question, the more likely someone is to understand your request and be able to help. A sample database with a minimum of records (and its support files, zipped together) will make it much easier to diagnose issues with your application. Screen shots of error messages are especially helpful.

When explaining how to reproduce your problem, please be as detailed as possible. Describe every step, click-by-click and keypress-by-keypress. Otherwise when others try to duplicate your problem, they may do something slightly different and end up with different results.

A note about attachments
You may only attach one file to each message. Attachment file size is limited to 2MB. If you need to include several files, you may do so by zipping them into a single archive.

If you forgot to attach your files to your post, please do NOT create a new thread. Instead, reply to your original message and attach the file there.

When attaching screen shots, it is best to attach an image file (.BMP, .JPG, .GIF, .PNG, etc.) or a zip file of several images, as opposed to a Word document containing the screen shots. Because Word documents are prone to viruses, many message board users will not open your Word file, therefore limiting their ability to help you.

Similarly, if you are uploading a zipped archive, you should simply create a .ZIP file and not a self-extracting .EXE as many users will not run your EXE file.
See more
See less

What to do with large MDB

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

    What to do with large MDB

    Hi all

    I have a script that drops a target table in an Access database and re-creates it via AlphaDAO. The table never has more than about 40 to 100 records in it. From time to time the access database size grows from 220K to 12Mb. I now have a script that overwrites the Access database from another one which I saved in a standby folder when this happens. I just want to now if anybody else have experienced this. Or if there is another solution to this. Or is it another undocumented feature of MS Access:D.

    Thanks
    Peter Gagiano

    #2
    Re: What to do with large MDB

    I have seen Access MDBs grow in size inexplicably.

    At some point, your best bet is going to be - to change out that MDB for - SQL Server Express.

    You'd be surprised how easy it can be. You can even *Export* your table structures and data directly to SQL Server Express, without having to recreate them.
    Frank R

    Comment


      #3
      Re: What to do with large MDB

      That's just one of the "features" of an Access MDB - they grow... never seems to hurt anything, but every time you create, add, delete within an Access database the thing grows... been going on since the first version. When inside Access, after a backup, you do a Compact on the database.

      From within Alpha could you run a sys_shell() with a command compact an Access database - there are command line options to compact an access database. I can't look right now, but will later if you haven't got them.

      Comment


        #4
        Re: What to do with large MDB

        Even with Compacting, I have seen Access MDBs not recover space and grow unexplicably - with the only solution being - recreate the database.

        The sweet spot for Access being a good pick - is, I'm afraid, far behind us.
        Unless a DB is for a single user solution, anything else - should get a migration to SQL Server Express.

        Anybody who wants help - let me know.
        Frank R

        Comment


          #5
          Re: What to do with large MDB

          Have to disagree on that one Frank. Access has been a solid performer for many years and version 2007 is an excellent development tool for MDB's and SQL back ends... single or multi-user. It's got it's share of problems just like any sophisticated piece of software and I'm not impressed that MS can't get two different runtime versions of Access to run on the same PC without jumping through hoops but... it's still a powerful tool.

          Comment


            #6
            Re: What to do with large MDB

            Access always had a great deal of power. I did some good work with Access.
            But I will still contend that once a small solution grows from single user to multi user, if you are using some other development tool and need a database, SQL Server Express is a much better choice these days than Access. And MS says the same.
            Frank R

            Comment


              #7
              Re: What to do with large MDB

              I all

              Thank you for the response. I do agree that SQL is the way to go and most of my solutions now incorporate it. The propblem is that I inherited the Access database from an existing system which the client is using and I had to do some integration. The MDB has to be copied to a remote site via FTP on a weekly basis. The Client does not have MS Access intalled on his PC and I cannot expect the client to go through a procedure to re-create the database every time when it decides to crow exponentially in size *. For now I have to stick to the existing way of copying a backup database into the work in process folder.

              Thanks
              Peter Gagiano

              Comment


                #8
                Re: What to do with large MDB

                What version is the Access DB? Since Access 2000 there is an option under Tools/Options to Compact Database on Close. Give that a try to see if it keeps the database to a decent size. Takes a second more to close the database but that would be worth it.

                Comment


                  #9
                  Re: What to do with large MDB

                  Hi David

                  I am not sure how to do this via a script. The script drops a table in the mdb and re-creates it. Thank you for the pointer I found and set the option in Access tools Options menu.

                  Thanks
                  Peter Gagiano

                  Comment

                  Working...
                  X