I currently have an MS Access application that connects to a PostgreSQL database via ODBC. This successfully runs on a LAN with 20 users (each running their own version of Access). Now I am thinking through some disaster recovery scenarios, and it seems that a quick and easy method of protecting the data is to use log shipping to create a warm-standby.
This lead me to think about putting this warm-standby at a remote location, but then I have the question:
Is Access connecting to a remote database via ODBC usable? I.e. the remote database is maybe in the same country with ok ping times and I have a 1mbit SDSL line.
onnodb,
The PostgreSQL ODBC driver is actively developed and an Access front-end combined with PostgreSQL server, in my opinion makes a great option on a LAN for rapid development. I have been involved in a reasonably big system (100+ PostgreSQL tables, 200+ Access forms, 1000+ Access queries & reports) and it has run excellently for a few years, with ~20 users. Any queries running slow because Access is doing something stupid can generally just be solved by using views, and any really data-intensive code can easily be moved into PostgreSQL functions and then called from Access.
The only main ODBC-related issue we have is that there is no way to kill a slow running query from Access, so we do often get users just killing Access and then massive queries are just left executing on the server.