Originally Posted by
Minty
Some of what @kevinoy04 is said above is broadly correct, but a majority of the slowness is caused by poor design e.g. loading forms with every record available.
Bound forms still perform very adequately if properly designed, and many developers use SQL and Azure as a back-end without any issues, as they design with that in mind from the get go.
Pulling in every record even with an Access backend is very inefficient.
With respect to the queries he is wrong - ODBC will make a majority of queries run very efficiently as it knows how to provide the correct syntax to SQL Server(you can prove this by looking at the execution plans and data exchanged between the two), provided they don't include any local VBA functions.
If they have any non native functions in them then all the records need to be pulled into Access to be processed, so if you use these they will need a rethink or moving to the BE.
Where required the power of a server based query or view will more than overcome any other down sides, but it does require some thought and planning.