On Wed, 10 Feb 2010 10:50:01 -0800, Irene_58
wrote:

Hi,
I have 3 or 4 databases developed separarely over the past couple of years
covering different areas of company activities - project monitoring, support
call monitoring, QHSE monitoring etc. The company has grown and I'm looking
to consolidate and distribute these. I'd intended to split them into FE/BE
so that the just the appropriate FEs could be installed on any user's PC and
the back-ends would reside on the server. I'd thought at first that I could
have a "core" BE with e.g. a staff and client table and activity specific
BEs. But the activity tables have the core tables PKs as FKs. Does this
mean I have to put all the tables into 1 BE? or am I missing something?

I think the nub of your problem is - as you have evidently gathered - that
Relationships with referential integrity enforced can only be established
between tables in the same backend. Unless there is some very good reason to
do otherwise (such as the size of the backend approaching the 2GByte limit, or
really critical security issues) I'd use a single backend; although you can
create queries joining tables across two backends, performance will suffer.
And you *do* lose referential integrity.

You might want to look into SQL Server Express as a shared backend.
--

John W. Vinson [MVP]