Hello,

Looking for some advice on choosing a local data source for a call reporting project that will have approximately 25 end users using it. I have currently developed the app in vb.net.

As of now, I am just using SQL Express edition and if I am deploying the project, I would like to be able to quickly access the data on the end users PC. Also, i'm finding that if I make a change in any of my table definitions (such as adding or removing a column), it seems to clear the data in my tables.

On the other hand, if I use MS Access, I get quick access to the tables if need be and I can make changes to the table without worrying about loosing data.

Any suggestions from a maintenance / performance perspective on the 2 sources?

Thanks,

Rashar

Use ADO and this shouldn't be much of an issue on the programming side. All that will change is the table and related SQL queries. Access is fine for small projects.

I think you should stick with SQL express. The .NET System.Data.Sql namespaces work very nicely with it and in general your code will look a bit cleaner. You'll also be able to take advantage of SQL Server functionality like stored procedures, views, etc. Access has similar, but more cumbersome counterpart features. Performance should be better too, although maybe not noticeably so. This is clearly the direction Microsoft is urging developers to go.

I'm not sure what the problem you're seeing with losing data is...You should definitely not lose entire table data when you change table structure. I've changed plenty of table structures in SQL express and never noticed this.

Good luck,
-SN