Microsoft Access Team Blog : Performance

Use late binding to improve the performance of tabbed forms

cdowns — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 18:03:47 GMT

Luke Chung, President and Founder of FMS, Inc., has written and presented a wide range of topics related to Access over the years. In addition to their many Access related products, FMS offers a wealth of great Access papers, tips, and video on their site.

If you use the Tab Control to pack a lot of controls onto a form, here is a great tip to make the form load more quickly. The secret is in keeping most of the controls unbound until you need them. For example, on the form shown below, you could keep the controls on the Address, Telephone, and Other info tabs unbound until you click the tabs.

Check out this tip on the FMS site!

Become a guest blogger on the Access Team Blog! Send your Power Tips to Chris and Mike at accpower@microsoft.com.

3 new articles available on MSDN

cdowns — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 18:40:46 GMT

MSDN writer Sal Ricciardi alerted us to the availability of 3 new articles on MSDN, two written by Luke Chung of FMS Inc., and one co-written by Luke Chung and Dan Haught.

Title	Author(s)
Performance Tips To Speed Up Your Access 2007 Database	Luke Chung and Dan Haught
Error Handling and Debugging Tips for Access 2007, VB, and VBA	Luke Chung
Tips and Techniques for Queries in Access 2007	Luke Chung

Definitely bookmark these for future reference!

Send your Power Tips to Mike and Chris at accpower@microsoft.com.

Users love fast apps

Clint Covington — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 06:29:32 GMT

There is a good article that recaps the recent O’Reilly Velocity 2009 conference on web performance and operations. I particularly liked this quote:

Phil Dixon, from Shopzilla, had the most takeaway statistics about the impact of performance on the bottom line. A year-long performance redesign resulted in a 5 second speed up (from ~7 seconds to ~2 seconds). This resulted in a 25% increase in page views, a 7-12% increase in revenue, and a 50% reduction in hardware. This last point shows the win-win of performance improvements, increasing revenue while driving down operating costs.

There are probably fewer ways to increase satisfaction from people that use your application than good old block and tackle performance improvements. Here is a help article with lots of useful ideas to explore making your app faster.

Do you have success stories of delighting customers by making your app faster? What techniques did you employ?

Fast-Fast-Fast Compact and Repair of Large Databases!

cdowns — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 18:43:12 GMT

Today’s guest blogger is Michael Groh, co-author of the popular Access 2007 Bible.

I think it's safe to say that anyone who's worked with really large Access databases (like, in excess of 50 or 100 megabytes) has encountered slow compact and repair cycles. My favorite anecdote in this regard is a very large database managed by an old buddy of mine. His database has several large tables containing more than 20 million rows each. When it's time to compact and repair, he starts it up on Friday before leaving work, and the operation is usually complete by Monday morning.

Not to worry! What Steve really needs to do is break up his humongous ACCDB file into multiple ACCDBs, each containing just one of his big tables, then link the individual database files to a central database. The central database, of course, would contain the forms, reports, queries, and other database. He'll find that compacting the constituent databases (as sequential operations) goes much faster than compacting the one big database.

Also, one advantage of breaking big databases up into smaller pieces is that, in the event of database corruption, the corruption will affect only one portion of the total database. Presumably, the database system is easily restored by replacing the corrupted database from a backup.