Migrate Access 2007 / SQL Server 2008 R2 Express to Office 365 / Azure

Question

We are looking to move from Access 2007 to Office 365 - with Access 2013. We want to have the latest software, both for our users and our server. And it would be nice for our employees to be able to open Access and connect from outside the building. Our backend is on SQL Express 2008 R2, on a Windows 2003 Server.

All the help I've seen so far is how to migrate a single Access database (holding the data and the forms and VBA, etc.) to Office 365. How do we really accomplish this? I also need to retain the VBA code so my users can use it.

I am told Office 365 E3 for me (because of VBA code) and SQL Azure will work, is that the best way to go?

ALso, when I measure the transactions / minute for my SQL Server 2008 R2 database under a moderate load, it returns back 7,200 transactions. This is the sql script I ran below. I modified it so that it ran for 1 minute.

enter code here DECLARE @cntr_value bigint

SELECT @cntr_value = cntr_value
    FROM sys.dm_os_performance_counters
    WHERE counter_name = 'transactions/sec'
        AND object_name = 'MSSQL$myDB:Databases'
        AND instance_name = 'myDB'

WAITFOR DELAY '00:01:00'

SELECT cntr_value - @cntr_value
    FROM sys.dm_os_performance_counters
    WHERE counter_name = 'transactions/sec'
        AND object_name = 'MSSQL$myDB:Databases'
        AND instance_name = 'myDB'

When I look at https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/dn741327.aspx , it says that the Azure S0 (which is the tier we are looking at) only has 521 transactions per minute.
Help!

Answer 1

If you desire to migrate to an Access Web App (HTML front end and SQL Azure backend), this configuration does not support VBA. If you need this functionality, then you need to stay with a traditional Access databases.

For the second part of your question, the published tx number is not a limit but instead highly contextual as it is the result from our benchmark. I highly suggest that you test on SQL Database to get the actual tx number for your workload.