At work we have a MS Access database we use solidly for 1 month every year and then forget about it for the other 11 months.

The file lives on a Win2k file server and approx. 8 clients connect across the (currently) 10MB lan. This works well enough so long as the database is compacted every day - it grows to about 3X 'normal' size (20MB) and becomes slow to load otherwise. Also, this 'feels' very corruption prone.

This year the customer data will be at least 5X larger than before and maybe it's about time we used a standalone SQL database engine with Access simply as a 'front end' - I appreciate this may not be the best solution but I need to consider available development time/skills/resources etc. ("My time!").

I know this can be done with MS SQL Server but preferably can we hookup Access to a MySQL database server instead to save money? It would also be helpful to understand whether development time is likely to be a lot higher with MySQL as opposed to MS SQL Server.

Any thoughts/ramblings (please)?

Thanks,
Rue