How do you set up a database to be accessed by multiple computers?

Question

How do you set up a database to be accessed by multiple computers?

Answer 1

According to Microsoft: A maximum of 64 connections per process with a limit of 256 concurrent open read/write connections per database. In practical use if you have more than 20 connections you will have a major performance hit! (Been there, done that.) You may need to switch to SQL and that means server software if you want to stick with Microsoft. A switch to Linux server with MySql is a good move and would be much faster. MySql has builtin features that prevent over writting data and offers "locks" to prevent accidental dual entries. It works very fast and multiple users are not an issue.

In most cases you can move existing data from Access, takes some work but isn't too bad as long as you understand the layout.

Answer 2

There are actually 2 easy ways to do this that don't involve extensive computer programming:



1. Buy a "network hard drive". That is an external hard drive (or even an array that contains multiple hard drives in a tower) that connects via Wi-Fi, or ethernet to your network. each computer can access the hard drives at any time and use them just like they were internal hard drives.



2. Designate a computer as the "server" and set the files to be shared in a folder that all computers in the network are allowed to share.



I do the second often between my numerous networked Macs, but it can be done under Windows, or Linux as well. I use an Airport Extreme as my wireless/ethernet router and it also has a USB port that allows me to add an external "network" hard drive if I wish.

Answer 3

Through Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl.

Answer 4

Create it using a HTML server...

and create what is called an Intranet... a Private Networking Website.



If you want to use Access you can as it all depends if you expect this Database to grow or not.



You can go the IIS Express way or look up LAMP stacks and WAMP.



And you can configure users to have different CRUD access.



HTML is always the best to use because every system has a Internet Browser on it so would be compatible.



If you want to learn about networking creating a webserver would be a goo place to start.



Also the learning curve would be turned down as would create a web user interface for any database you want to give access to... you can also pay a web designer to create the site.

Answer 5

While not ideal, you can set up a network share on one machine, put the database in there, and map the drive to the other machines, and have them open the same database. This will work with a small, simple database and a few users.



A better way is to set up a separate SQL server, using a product like Mysql. This hosts the actual database, and you run an Access database on each workstation that sends the users queries to the main database server. This is more complicated to set up of course, but it will handle a large database / multiple users a lot better. The Access is only used to create the menus / reports etc. Handling the actual database itself, searching, record locking, editing etc is done by the dedicated back end server.



https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Ways-to-share-an-Access-database-2c24eb08-bee1-453e-be8e-455f847c5c74



There is also the options of Split database and Sharepoint.

Split database means each machine has it's own 'menu" section of the database, and that's linked to one central shared access DB.

Sharepoint is Microsoft's own back end database server, but you need to buy MS Server it implement that.



The first options, network share is the simplest, and Mysql with work on your existing Win10 machines and is open source so you don't have to buy more software (Just learn how to use it)