Microsoft Access 2010 Bible

841

CHAPTER

Optimizing Access

Applications

IN THIS CHAPTER

Taking advantage of VBA’s

Load on Demand

functionality

Deciding which file format

to use

Using .accde databases for

better performance

Achieving better performance

through compilation

Increasing the absolute speed

of your application

Increasing the perceived speed

of your application

Using special techniques with

large databases

W

hen Microsoft introduced 32-bit Access, a number of new perfor-
mance concerns came part and parcel with the new features and
functions. Microsoft continues to make a conscious effort to
enhance the performance of the Access database engine, as well as compila-
tion techniques and features such as the formerly undocumented Decompile
command. The end result is that Microsoft has helped to ease your burden,
but in no way has it completely taken that burden from you.

Tip
The published minimum RAM requirement for a computer to run Access on
Windows XP (SP2 or later), Windows Server 2003 (or higher), or Windows
Vista or Windows 7 is 256MB — with an emphasis on minimum. If you plan to
do serious development with Access, you should have at least 512MB to 1GB
of RAM or, preferably, 2GB or more.

With today’s computers and memory prices, this amount of memory is a valuable
investment. In fact, simply adding more memory will increase speed much more
than changing your processor speed, because Access must use the hard drive as a
virtual memory area if it doesn’t have enough memory. Hard drives are slow, and
big hard drives are even slower — regardless of the processor speed.

Understanding Module

Load on Demand

One of the great features of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), the core lan-
guage of Microsoft Access, is its load on demand functionality. Using load on
demand, Access loads code modules only as they’re needed or referenced. In