Performance Over A VPN Is Very Good in Access 2010 Hybrid App

I finally got my hands on a copy of Access 2010 that I could install locally (as opposed to thru Terminal Services) and duly installed it in a Windows 7 VM.  I promptly Published an application that I have used for testing Access 2007 and SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 with Access Services.  After a few small changes to the data definitions I was able to Publish the application successfully.  I then created an ACCDW file so I could launch the application from my machine that was connected through a VPN to the Network on which the SP Server resided.

This is important to understand !!  When I launched the ACCDW “shortcut” there was indeed a fairly long delay in launching the Main Menu.  This was as I expected because Access Services was busily downloading a copy of all my data (and there was several tables with several thousand records in each) to my local cache.  This was expected.  Then I opened some forms and found the performance to be very good.  I exited the application and came back in an BINGO !  right into it.  The performance was sensational.  That’s simply because I was actually running off of a local cached copy of the data.

So I decided to make a few changes to the data itself and the app was perfectly responsive as it took my data and synched it with the SP version silently in the background.

So at this stage it looks to me that my days of using Terminal Services to deliver adequate performance on a distributed Access application MAY soon be over.  This is a good thing – to say the least – actually this is a BIG thing !!

The open questions now are – what is the performance if I do a major Action query, say that runs an Update against every record in a table of several thousand records?  We’ll see…..

The other question then is – “If a Hybrid application does nearly all its heavy lifting on the client and simply synchs changes back to the Server then what is the REAL limit of this technology for large data sets? ”   How will the SharePoint Admins take to the idea of large data sets residing in Access Services Tables on their beloved Servers?  Because believe me it WILL happen.

Hmmm … Inquiring minds want to know…  We’ll see too I guess….

Dick