Chapter 34: Understanding Access Services
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You can customize colors, fonts, and some other appearance attributes of a SharePoint page. The
basic layout, however, with the Navigation Pane at the left, a ribbon and “breadcrumbs” at the top,
and an items list to the right of the Navigation Pane, are common to all SharePoint pages.
If absolutely necessary, you can create a custom page template from scratch, or from an existing
template, and use it on a SharePoint site. But because most SharePoint sites are used on an intranet
for a specialized audience, the default page layout usually works quite well.
Fewer than 20,000 rows of data
Although SharePoint is not a high-performance database system, users have performance expecta-
tions when using any Access application. Microsoft has determined that the best performance
(even with the data caching provided by Access Services) is achieved when the upsized Access
application contains no more than 3 tables containing 20,000 rows of data each, and no more than
20 tables containing 1,000 rows of data each. In relatively small applications, the best performance
is achieved when one main table contains 10,000 or fewer rows and 10 to 20 other tables have
fewer than 1,000 rows of data.
Larger applications are good candidates for more traditional Web development, using tools such
as ASP.NET and SQL Server. These development platforms are geared toward large-scale, high-
performance, data-driven Web sites. However, Web development with .NET and SQL Server is,
in general, considerably more expensive and time-consuming than upsizing Access database
applications to SharePoint.
Microsoft is blunt in suggesting that applications with more than 40,000 rows in any one table are
not good candidates for SharePoint-hosted Access applications. As you’ll see in Chapter 35, you
can create hybrid Access applications that incorporate some aspects of SharePoint hosting, but
more work is required of the developers creating these applications.
Modest transactional requirements
A major benefit of traditional Web applications is that they can be scaled to virtually any audience.
The main performance bottleneck for most Web applications is the Web server and its software.
Web site performance issues can usually be resolved by adding more hardware and using load-
balancing techniques to distribute user demand over multiple database servers. A well-designed
Web application (such as Amazon.com) can service many thousands of users simultaneously with
acceptable performance.
A SharePoint-hosted Access Web application is not a great platform (even on an intranet) for envi-
ronments where hundreds of users are constantly adding to or updating data. Although SharePoint
uses SQL Server as its underlying database, database updates are considerably slower than when
working directly with SQL Server tables through linked Access tables or stored procedures.
In other words, a SharePoint-hosted Access database should not be used for applications requiring
high-volume data entry features. Instead, the SharePoint-hosted Access application would be used
ideally for moderate database updates and reporting.