Tim said:
The whole thing is a mess isn't it? This page, in the same volume
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HP010322481033.aspx
has a table of the "13 primary data types" with fourteen rows... and they
seem to have forgotten COUNTER, DOUBLE, CHAR, etc.
I was going to say that they've used the synonym FLOAT in place of
DOUBLE but then I saw
"DATETIME (See DOUBLE)"
lol!
Similarly, before I could say that COUNTER is not strictly a data type,
more of like a property, I saw:
"Both the seed and the increment can be modified using an ALTER TABLE
statement"
I followed the link to the Equivalent ANSI SQL Data Types and saw more
inconsistencies there.
Yes, this version of the Jet 4.0 SQL Reference is borderline unusable.
Has anyone with more influence than me reported it?
I get the impression of a documentation team that is working from a
different set of specs from the programming team. It is certainly
possible that temp tables were going to be built into jet but got
withdrawn later.
I came to exactly the same conclusions.
In general, I am really depressed by the direction that Access is taking,
and I can see my future desktop databases being in vb.net/ ado.net/ sql
express, or php/ mySQL.
I've always had a soft spot for Jet: as regards data integrity, which
you mentioned, its support for multi-table CHECK constraints is
non-existent in most other SQLs. I think the fact its future
development is now in the hands of the Access team, who have no
interest in fixing any current problems, means Jet is effectively dead
in the water. Jet development has been in limbo for half a decade and
soon people will stop using it. I can only hope this is good news for
Access purists.
Jamie.
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