How to optimize Microsoft Access to improve speed

Introduced

As a database programmer, your primary task is to enable your users to quickly select, manage, and access the information they need. The rest of the work is almost static, and as long as your database application executes faster, your program becomes more efficient. The purpose of this article is to highlight a variety of techniques and strategies that can be used to improve speed and make your Microsoft Access database application more efficient, which will help you accomplish your main mission as a database developer.

Hardware

The root of the problem of aiming speed

In order to improve the speed of your database program, you will naturally think of some of the most basic aspects of the impact speed, and we will start with dealing with these parts. When you try to improve the performance of your database program, the hardware platform that your program runs on will be the only determinant. Obviously, the first principle of implementing optimizations should be faster hardware = faster databases, and of course CPU and RAM are at the heart of this equation. I'm sure you'll notice what Microsoft Access declares, you need at least 8MB of RAM and a 80486 CPU to achieve a satisfying performance. In general, users are aware of this, but I've seen many users frustrated with the speed of their Microsoft Access execution, and when I asked them what machine they used to run the program, they told me it was a 80386, And is a MSACCESS.EXE running on a server. So, while trusting your users to improve their program performance through the following methods, it is always important to emphasize that the hardware is the key issue during Microsoft Access execution.

A valid disk access

Assuming you have a satisfactory hardware configuration, let's discuss how you can improve the speed at which Microsoft Access is running on this platform. As far as this problem is concerned, the second factor that affects the performance of your database program is disk access. During execution, access to the physical disk is always a bottleneck (compared to accessing the data stored in RAM), so you should minimize access to the disk. However, since your application always has to deal with some disk or some other physical device, your goal should be to ensure that all disk access is as effective as possible. The way to do this is to regularly defragment your disk data, organize the disk drives where your database resides, and all the disk drives you need to run your database program, and you should also remind your users to periodically clean up disk fragments to ensure that disk access remains valid. This minimizes the time spent reading and writing to physical disks, although these are unavoidable, while optimizing the performance of the entire system.

Maximize RAM/Minimize the frequency of disk access

The next topic is to minimize the frequency with which your database programs deal with physical disk drives. The key to doing this is to free as much RAM space as possible for your application. To achieve this, you need to do the following:

Increase the size of the maximum buffer

The first involves your setting of the maximum buffer size. The maximum buffer size refers to the amount of RAM that Microsoft Access retains as internal storage space. The larger the storage space, the more likely the user needs data to be found in RAM, while reducing the frequency of access to physical disks. The minimum buffer that Microsoft Access needs is 512KB, and if your hardware system has more than 4MB of RAM, you can allocate more for it to Microsoft Access (which also increases system performance). To do this, simply add the maximum buffer setting in the Msaccess.ini (in your Windows directory) file, and use your text editor, such as Notepad, to find the [Option] segment in the file and add the following sentence:

MaxBufferSize = xxxxx

XXXXX is a new setting for your application to allocate storage space (for example, setting maxbuffersize=2048 will allocate 2MB of buffer space for Microsoft Access). So, how much should you allocate to be appropriate? Apart from "as many as possible", the others are hard to say. You need to manually adjust this setting and try to get your hardware to provide the following: 1 The program that does not prevent the user from running at the same time, 2 does not affect the operating efficiency of its own underlying OS (you may want to pass the program when it starts). INI file to view the configuration of Microsoft Access itself, any modifications to the Msaccess.ini file will only work when Microsoft Access starts the next time, and for the currently running Microsoft Access programs have no effect whatsoever).

Avoid loading wizards

To free more memory for use by Microsoft Access, another step you can take is: if you don't use wizards, then don't load it. You can open the Msaccess.ini file, find the [Libraries] section, and precede the phrase "Wizards.mdb=ro" with a semicolon, thus avoiding automatic load wizards. Doing so will allow 315B of RAM to be available to Microsoft Access for your own use, not only to improve uptime performance, but also to reduce the average installation time of approximately 10 seconds per application.