I developed a Visual Basic 4 (16bit) program using MS Access 2 (Office 95) as the database (yes I know it is ancient technology). I have sold it to about 20 clients and am wanting to develop the market further. I want to upgrade it to Visual Basic 6 and a later version of Access. However because it is a niche market that doesn't spend money easily, my development costs so far have not been covered at all. So the upgrade must be as simple and cost effective as possible. I have been developing on my own from a home business so I have not always used the best methods due to ignorance.
For reasons that I can no longer remember, all the Access tables are in separate .mdb files. I have about 50 .mdb files. I believe this is not the best idea as far as ease of running sql queries etc. Should I combine all the Access tables into one .mdb file? Are there any disadvantages to this? For instance I have heard that if Access files get too big, they become unstable and grind to a halt. Some of my clients are companies with 15000 employees that need to be loaded onto the employee file and for some potential ones the traffic is such that there may be 30000 records in some tables saved per year (or even 30000 per month?) This translates to about 3.5MB for the employee table and 6MB for some of the tables with 50000 records - total size of Access folder about 50MB after 1 year of running. But I would like the program to be able to cater for even bigger volumes than these.
Which versions of Access are compatible with which versions of Visual Basic? Are there compatibility programs that need to be run? Which version of Access should I upgrade to? I do need Multi-User functionality - I have built this into my code but I believe that later versions of Access have more multi-user functionality built in. I would need the capability for about 10 users to simultaneously be using the system - although the reality is that they are unlikely to all access the same records at the same time.
At what size database would Access no longer be a viable proposition? What are the alternatives? MySQL? SQL Server? How easy would a switch over be?
What will be the major obstacles in an upgrade from VB4 to VB6? I use lots of grids and I believe there is an issue with these?
This is my first EE Question - thanks for your help
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