Verlag Dr. C. Mueller-Straten <[log in to unmask]> wrote in article <[log in to unmask]>... > As far as I know, MS does not tell users that it is confined to about 30.000 > objects. The more objects are stored, the slowly it will work. For larger > museums MS Access does not seems to be a good idea. A real data base is better. > Or am I wrong? > Though our current database is nowhere near that size, I have in the past run with tables of over 100,000 items and multiple relations to other tables in Access with little trouble as long as the machine used has enough memory. (The speed limitations were definitely not legendary in the first two iterations of Access though!!!) I know several programmers who regularly use the Jet engine from Access as a back end with Visual BASIC for mailing list, fund-raising tracking and other similar files that large as well. One nice thing about Access 97 is that it is very upwardly mobile. If you store all of your data in Access, it allows you to export to almost any Windows program easily. If you decide you want to "move up" to SQL Server or some other "heavy duty" database, the data conversion is almost painless unless you are making significant changes to the data at the same time. E. L. Wimett Collections/Information Systems Manager Patriots Point Naval & Maritime Museum