I was just talking to a consultant I hired about this. Even with source management, it is virtually impossible to have two people working in the same database. At the moment, I've isolated enough of the framework so he can develop reports for me outside the main app and I integrate them as he finishes. The problem is the framework isn't quite complete so as we make changes to that, we are having trouble syncing the two .accdb's.

The problem with how Access integrated with Source Safe et. al. is that it was so incredibly slow that you couldn't check out all items when you opened the app. You had to check them out one at a time when you wanted to make a change. But, that is where the trouble came in. You could still change anything even if you hadn't checked it out and when you closed the database, you never knew you were now out of sync. The app we are trying to work on together now has 50 tables, most are linked but a couple are local to the FE because they control things like the menu and selection criteria options for the reports, 111 forms/subforms, 43 reports/subreports, 15 code modules (in addition to the class modules attached to each form/report) and almost 400 queries. It's a good sized Access app but not even close to the largest I've ever built. Given our timeframe, I need help which is why I brought in someone else but given the overhead of coordination, it is less productive than I had hoped. For those of you old enough to remember "The Mythical Man Month", it doesn't matter how hard they try, nine women simply cannot make a baby in one month:)

So, this is the true reason that Access apps tend to be on the smaller side. It doesn't have anything to do with the number of users or the size of the tables since both of those problems are easily solved by using a server based RDBMS instead of Jet/ACE, it has to do with the number of objects that need to be created and the timeframe for the project. There is just so much that one developer can do in a day and it is simply too hard to add additional developers productively.