Microsoft Access VBA Programming for the Absolute Beginner

Overview

When Access was introduced, it was positioned primarily as a single-user, single-desktop database application. Since its introduction, however, networking has become virtually ubiquitous, and many web pages rely on Access as their data store. This means that an Access database is more and more likely to be accessed by multiple users (or to serve multiple simultaneous requests to a web server).

That multiple users can access an Access database simultaneously raises two issues. The first is performance: if an application is not designed and code is not written to be efficient, an application often runs more and more slowly as more data is added to it and as more users access it.

The second issue is resource contention: you must make sure that data accessed and changed by one user is not overwritten (and corrupted) by data from another user, or that one user is not locked out of the database for a protracted period while another user accesses it exclusively.

In this chapter, we’ll examine some of the basic techniques you can use to make sure that multiuser applications perform efficiently, with minimal contention for resources.