hello there,
i am a .net programmer who now is responsible for the maintenance of a "historically grown" access database application.
the application has a sql server backend where most of the data is deployed. that backend isnt a problem. its fast enough, stable and generally ok.
the access application has mixed content (still data/backend AND gui/frontend) which means thousands of forms, thousands of queries, hundreds of tables that are not extracted to the sql server and a lot of macros. the whole accdb file has around 200mb.
it was an access2000 database which runs on access 2007 now. with a few tweaks (/largeaddressspaceaware flag and a few registry settings like maxcachesize) and source code changes it is running relatively smoothly now.
we had a lot of problems with this database (see the tweaks) which we could resolve. though i am not happy about these tweaks the database SEEMS to be running fine now.
a big problem is the version control. up until now we used oasis svn. the export of the source code was painfully slow (i'm talking DAYS here) and now we try using dev tools plugin + team explorer + msscci on visualstudio.com. problem is: access crashes when we try adding the database to version control. it says "db has to be closed to be added" -> ok -> wait -> crash.
oasis svn now is even slower when we open the export dialog. it used to take like 2 minutes, now it takes 10 minutes to just open the export dialog.
now the first question:
what can we do to make version control possible?
my first thought was: completely divide backend and frontend that we have one fe and two backends (one accdb one sql server). would this help?
what do you think about dividing the frontend in multiple accdb files? can this even be done?
what are your suggestions for version control? why is it crashing?
next problem:
i was told by a coworker that a lot of the modules throw exceptions as soon as we say "debug->compile". now i suspect this whole thing to be a bigger problem than i first thought. what do you guys think about those messages about compilation errors?
one example:
"qdf.OpenDAO" throws method or data object not found (error because of opendao).
how comes the application works though it can not be compiled?