Tuesday, July 15, 2008
In
Many websites, especially those designed a few years ago using Microsoft’s ASP technology use Microsoft Access databases to store data.
For a website that has a reasonable number of visitors, Access is not an ideal database solution to use, and can really slow down your site. As we all know, a slow site is one that visitors will leave quickly.
Access is designed to be a data storage system for single computers, and is ideal for this. It stores data in files which live on your hard drive and is perfectly suited for small scale data manipulation by a single user.
When data is intended for use on the internet, it needs to be served. Access is not suited to serving large amounts of data to multiple visitors to your website and the competition for the data will slow down your site. In short, Access cannot physically handle multiple users and in a worse case scenario, you site could crash.
This is where Microsoft SQL Server comes in. SQL Server is a much larger-scale, industry standard data storage system and runs on a dedicated data server – it is used to serving large amounts of data to multiple users and performing complex data manipulation tasks.
Use a bus, not a car
If you want to go somewhere with a few people a car will do, but if you need to transport a large number of people you need a bus. Access is the equivalent of a car, whilst SQL Server is equivalent of a bus – with a website you need a bus for your data storage, not a car.
If you site is built around Access, especially if you are running an e-commerce site, your data storage is unsuitable. A more robust and scaleable solution is to upgrade to SQL Server. This would require re-coding of your website and possibly changing your hosting, but if you are serious about expanding and developing your online presence, these benefits far outweigh the initial costs.
For more information about upgrading your Access databases to SQL Server and futureproofing your website, please contact us.