[Samba] File Locking and MS Access

[David Brodbeck]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Ehle [mailto:mehle at willard.lib.mi.us]

> Why? MySql and MyOBDC are free, and perform much better than 
> Access. You still use access to, well, access the MySQL server. The data 
> sits on the server and MySQL handles the transactions. You can even put
MySQL on a
> windows machine if you want to. It works pretty well that way.

I just set this up here.  It was a lot of work, because we had some Access
table names with spaces in them.  (Illegal in MySQL.)  The result was I had
to rewrite all the queries.  The users have been happy with it, though...no
more spates of database corruption that result in losing a day or two of
work.

There *are* some quirks and gotchas with Access and MyODBC.  Anyone thinking
of doing this should read the FAQs carefully.

By itself Access is a toy database.  It works fine until you have more than
five or six people accessing the file simultaneously, then it fails in nasty
ways.  This is part of Microsoft's business model -- the database works
until it gets big enough to be important to your company, then it fails and
they sell you Microsoft SQL Server as a back end.