Customers with ColdFusion Websites sometimes report that their pages return: “Error Executing Database Query. Timed out trying to establish connection.”
If you have a non-ColdFusion Website (i.e. ASP/.NET, PHP, etc.), you may get a similar “time-out” error on occasion, if your site uses an MS-Access Database. The frequency of such errors depends on a number of factors, primary of which is the number of simultaneous visitors to your site.
My reason for making this blog posting is to point out that unless your Website is for nothing more important than to maybe show pictures of your new cat or dog, and would therefore never get more than a few visitors at a time… then you should NOT make use of an MS-Access Database for your live business Website.
http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_17034&sliceId=2
In this regard, please see the knowledgebase article from Adobe (the maker of ColdFusion) at the above URL, which is entitled “Using Microsoft Access Databases in a Production Environment”. Therein they provide details of why this should NOT be done, and they link out to additional information from Microsoft stating the same.
When the creator of MS-Access states that you should NOT use their product on a production Website, and then the creator of ColdFusion states the same… it certainly cannot be seen as a failure of your hosting provider, if your site suffers performance issues and errors as a result of using an MS-Access Database, despite these warnings to the contrary.
Instead of using an MS-Access Database for your Website, you should use either a MySQL or MS-SQL Database. All ViUX™ Hosting plans support MySQL v5.x Databases; and all plans with the exception of the “Xpress SHS-W” and our Linux plans provide full support for MS-SQL 2005 Databases. Either of these two enterprise level database systems will provide solid and error free service to your business Website; however the same cannot be said of MS-Access.
In fact, MS-Access Databases can even cause performance issues and errors for other sites hosted on the same server that are not using MS-Access. This is because they can cause the ColdFusion ODBC service to hang, thus bringing down all database driven ColdFusion sites on the server. For this reason many hosting providers have discontinued support for MS-Access Databases entirely and banned there use on shared hosting servers.
ViUX™ has considered doing the same; however the problem has not yet reached the point of making such a drastic step necessary. That said… all site owners that choose to continue making use of an MS-Access Database should be aware that if their site is found to be causing a server-wide issue, that it would be a violation of our Terms of Service (ToS) and their site would be stopped to protect other customers that share the same server. It is therefore our strongest recommendation that all sites making use of MS-Access Databases replace these with either MySQL or MS-SQL, unless the site is not of an important nature where you would be concerned with its uptime.
Due to the statements from Microsoft and Adobe warning against the use of an MS-Access Database on a production Website, ViUX™ would NOT consider any downtime related to such ill-advised use to be a failing on our part; and therefore our 99.9% uptime guarantee would NOT apply.
For anyone in need of help or direction in updating their Website from MS-Access to MySQL or MS-SQL, please open a ticket with support@viux.com and we would be happy to assist where we can.