Upgrade?

[Leslie Isaacs]

Hello All

I have spent considerable time looking into the question of whether or not
to upgrade my A97 application to A2003, and have found a lot of information
on the web. Unfortunately a lot of it seems to be contradictory, and much of
it is over my head (I am a competent amateur, not a prefessional). I would
be extremely grateful if someone could put into SIMPLE terms ( and I realise
this may be asking a lot!) the main differences.

The current A97 application is a split FE/BE, with the FEs running on four
windows2K PCs and the BE on a server with W2K server. The FEs are pretty
large and complex, having been continuously debveloped over 5-6 years or so.

The essential requirements, in order of priority, are:

reliability - am I likely to get more crashes, or data corruption, or bugs
or other nasties, with A97 or A2003?
speed - in terms of running modules, macros, queries, is either likely to be
consistently faster?
features - is there anything particularly useful in either that is not in
the other?

I hope someone can help me with this, as I am feeling fairly confused about
it all so far.

Many thanks
Leslie Isaacs

 

[Douglas J Steele]

You may want to check what Allen Browne has at
http://www.allenbrowne.com/ser-48.html

Access 97 is generally considered to be the most stable version of Access
out there. However, the fact that it's now out of support may be an issue
for some people.

 

[Allen Browne]

Doug has already given the reference to what I have to offer, so let me
address your specific questions:

1. Reliability
If you have a database that is not being modified (i.e. just the data is
changing, but the forms, reports, and code are not being changed, as in an
MDE), both Access 97 and Access 2003 will be extremely stable.

If you have set up the database correctly, and there are no factors that
cause interrupted writes (faulty computers, network, power, or users who
just crash out), you can go for years without seeing a corruption.

2. Speed
As with most software, the older version will be faster. For example, Access
2000 and later use Unicode (2 bytes for every character), so there's double
the disk reads (or more CPU activity if you use Unicode Compression to avoid
that.) User-defined functions executed in a query are also much slower in
the JET 4 databases (Access 2000 and later)

In practice, though, a well-written Access 2003 database will still be ahead
of what any user can enter, so in most real-world scenarios this issue is
academic. If you do find things running much slower under A2003, you can
probably solve the problem by working through Tony Toews' list:
http://www.granite.ab.ca/access/performancefaq.htm

3. Features
Depends what you need. If you need XML, A2003 will be valuable. If you like
working on dual-monitors, you can do that in A2003. If you need to be able
to write to an Excel spreadsheet, you had better stay with A97, as Microsoft
recently crippled Access 2002 and 2003 so they can no longer do this.

 

[Jesper F]

Depends what you need. If you need XML, A2003 will be valuable. If you

like working on dual-monitors, you can do that in A2003. If you need to be
able to write to an Excel spreadsheet, you had better stay with A97, as
Microsoft recently crippled Access 2002 and 2003 so they can no longer do
this.

I'm jumping in here - how have they cripled it? Is there then no way to do
it?
I'm doing in with late binding in a couple of apps and I'm getting nervous.


Jesper Fjølner

 

[Douglas J Steele]

I'm jumping in here - how have they cripled it? Is there then no way to do
it?
I'm doing in with late binding in a couple of apps and I'm getting

nervous.

A law suit was recently decided against Microsoft. Because of that, the
ability to update linked Excel tables has been removed from both Access 2002
and 2003. As far as I'm aware, no other change was made.

Automation should continue to work without any issues, whether you're using
Early or Late Binding.

 

[david epsom dot com dot au]

The way that the change was made - altering the Jet IISAM
registration - coupled with failures on my pc, led me to
believe that all export to XLS had been disabled.

I have since been assured that this is not so, by people
who have not responded to my request for specific information.

On my PC,

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Jet\4.0\Engines\Excel

the Win32 value
c:\windows\system32\MSexcl40.dll

was changed to
C:\program files\Office11\msaexp30.dll


Here is what failed: (using any existing table at the end
of the string)

codedb.execute "select * into [Excel 8.0;DATABASE=c:\tmp.xls].[fred] from
myTable"

I guess it probably is supposed to work: I have no way
of telling.

(david)

 

[Albert D.Kallal]

I'm jumping in here - how have they cripled it? Is there then no way to do
it?
I'm doing in with late binding in a couple of apps and I'm getting
nervous.

you can still export to excel. And you can still link to excel sheets. You
just can't update a linked sheet from Access....

So, the work around would be to import the Excel sheet...modify it..and
export it back into excel.

So, as far as I know, the ONLY feature removed was the ability to modify a
linked table....