Editing Microsoft Access (section)

===Split database architecture===
Microsoft Access applications can adopt a split-database architecture. The single database can be divided into a separate "back-end" file that contains the data tables (shared on a file server) and a "front-end" (containing the application's objects such as queries, forms, reports, macros, and modules). The "front-end" Access application is distributed to each user's desktop and linked to the shared database. Using this approach, each user has a copy of Microsoft Access (or the runtime version) installed on their machine along with their application database. This reduces network traffic since the application is not retrieved for each use. The "front-end" database can still contain local tables for storing a user's settings or temporary data. This split-database design also allows development of the application independent of the data. One disadvantage is that users may make various changes to their own local copy of the application and this makes it hard to manage version control. When a new version is ready, the front-end database is replaced without impacting the data database. Microsoft Access has two built-in utilities, Database Splitter<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.fmsinc.com/MicrosoftAccess/DatabaseSplitter/|title=Microsoft Access Split Database Architecture to Support Multiuser Environments, Improve Performance, and Simplify Maintainability|publisher=Fmsinc.com|access-date=April 24, 2013}}</ref> and Linked Table Manager, to facilitate this architecture.

Linked tables in Access use absolute paths rather than relative paths, so the development environment either has to have the same path as the production environment or a "dynamic-linker" routine can be written in [[Visual Basic for Applications|VBA]].

For very large Access databases, this may have performance issues and a SQL backend should be considered in these circumstances. This is less of an issue if the entire database can fit in the PC's RAM since Access caches data and indexes.