Increase access speed for users in multiple countries

Question

We have set up a SQL sever database that serves as the back end for an Access front end.
We have users in Australia (NSW, Victoria and SA) and in Batam, Indonesia.
All Australian users have acceptable access speeds, but the users in Batam, Indonesia are experiencing severe slowdowns, even on a clear 12meg duplex connection.
Please advise how we may resolve this so our Indonesian users have the same access speed as our Australian users.

Answer 1

Hi Nigel,
It is correct that the geo-replication only offers readable secondaries (in the Premium service tiers). If your workload is mostly reads with occasional writes, you can consider having local secondaries for the read queries and perform the writes into
the central primary DB.
One other thing you could look into is to shard the data, if the application and dataset allows this:
http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/sql-database-elastic-scale-get-started/
However if you cannot split up the data and all your sites require constant write access and operate on the same dataset, I believe it comes down to running a single DB in the 'optimal' location.
Hope that helps,
Jan