I'm working a contract in the QA department of a well known multinational
car company. Their QA survey data is surprisingly disorganized and I
proposed an Access application to facilitate data collection and analysis.
When I began coding the app I ran into trouble storing the truly huge
volumes of data in Access tables.

Respected members of this group advised upsizing using another product as
backend. That might be a possibility but I have never administered a system
involving Access as a front end to something like a SQLServer (or maybe
Oracle) backend. I have other duties and I'm worred that I won't have time
to climb a learning curve. I see that Access includes an upsizing wizard,
which is encouraging.

But, learning curve aside, we are still dealing with hundreds of millions of
records. We will probably hit a billion before the end of the year. Even
using a better product as the back end, is it really possible to calculate
sums and averages across that much data? For instance, across a network,
would it not take hours to run a simple Totals query? I suppose it must be
doable or nobody would bother upsizing.

I understand that my question is extremely open ended and I certainly don't
want anyone writing a book in response to this post. It's actually unlikely
that I would be allowed to go down this road even if I could find the
personal courage to do so, but I would like to know just a little more so I
can at least discuss the matter intelligently while I'm apologizing to my
boss for making promises that I can't keep.

Thanks in advance.

David Portwood