Access 2013 Bible

Chapter 29: Integrating Access and SQL Server

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding data types in SQL Server

Installing SQL Server Express

Linking SQL Server tables

Accessing SQL Server with ADO

Understanding SQL Server database objects

Microsoft has increasingly positioned Access as a gateway to SQL Server data. SQL Server, of course, is Microsoft's flagship enterprise database engine, and it's frequently used to drive mission-critical applications for tens of thousands of companies around the world. Because of its excellent scalability, fault tolerance, transaction logging, and other features, SQL Server is often used as the data store behind large websites for data warehousing and for business intelligence purposes.

Depending on installation specifics, SQL Server is able to serve many thousands of users simultaneously. From SQL Server's perspective, an Access application making requests for data is just another user — and it's treated no differently from any other client.

On the Web

This chapter uses a database named Chapter29.accdb. If you haven't already downloaded it from this book's website, you'll need to do so now. The linked tables in Chapter29.accdb won't work unless you happen to have the exact same setup used in this chapter.

Databases that contain linked tables generally don't work when used on a different computer. Chapter 7 discusses linked tables in detail and how to ...