Microsoft Access 2010 Bible

Part VI: Access as an Enterprise Platform

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If you’re a user sitting at the leftmost client computer and your application is using data stored in

the database on the server computer, you’re obviously working in a tight client/server system. If,

however, your application needs data stored on a remote computer located on the Internet, the

server computer (at least temporarily) becomes a client with regard to the remote server machine.

Very often, the distinction between client and server is not entirely clear. In the case of an Access

application working with data stored in SQL Server, however, Access is always the client and SQL

Server is always the server.

Applications

Figure 36.1 illustrates how the terms client and server are used when considering a computer sys-

tem as a whole. A client may be physically located near the server computer, or it may be very dis-

tant and accesses the server through the Internet.

An application is a program running locally on a client computer. The application performs the

operation of connecting the client computer to a server computer. The server computer can be

somewhere on the local network or located on the Internet. Figure 36.2 and Figure 36.3 show two

different applications.

From these figures, it’s not clear exactly where the data displayed on the forms is stored. When

properly implemented, the user is unaware of whether the data is stored locally or remotely in a

server application. The data could be sourced from SQL Server or SharePoint, or it could be more

local as linked tables in a back-end Access database file, or contained entirely within the current

.accdb file.

FIGURE 36.2

An automobile products application entry screen (an Access form)