We have a developer who wrote a custom Access database for our company. It's purpose is to enable us to enter all of our project information into it and have it readily accessible to anyone who needs to defer back to old projects for information.
There is a custom front-end user interface for people to input queries to search the database for project information and the database will return the results of the query.
Two particular issues that have been encountered:
1. No more than two people can open the database at a time through clicking a shortcut created for it. Any further attempts beyond the initial two people to open the database have to be done by opening Access first and then opening the actual .MDB file.
Repeated attempts to open the database by its shortcut result in nothing happening. These folks are a mix of Access 2003 and 2007.
The developer insists that multiple people should be able to open the database and use it at will.
2. After a few people do open the database, it bloats in size from its 10MB size to 35MB with no edits / additions / changes made to it.
The majority of my background in IT has not involved Access to any significant degree. IMO, the developer seems to be passing the buck on issues that seem to be inherent to the database. However, those are only my suspicions.
I know that 'bloat' is pretty much synonymous with anything Microsoft. However, I took a copy of the database and ran a /compact command switch on it from a DOS prompt to compact the database. It went from 30MB to 5MB. That doesn't seem right to me.
Can anyone confirm my suspicions or otherwise substantiate that there's something wrong with 'us' (the way we're opening the database) and not the database itself? Is it in fact normal for an Access database to bloat to the degree I've described?
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