Tony's Microsoft Access Blog

So, why do you keep mentioning this project? Are you working with Java? I can't see that it is of the slightest use to an Access developer, and I just don't understand why the Linux folk want to use Jet (ACE is not relevant as they are supporting only Jet 4).

Their FAQ also seems to indicate that they don't really get the distinction between Access and Jet, given that they say their driver supports A2000 but not A2003 -- there were no differences in Jet at all between those two releases, and the only differences in the file format were at the level of Access-only properties (or, put another way, the updates to Jet were independent of the Access version -- each subsequent Jet 4.0 service pack worked transparently with all the Jet 4-compatible versions of Access). Jet alone should be able to handle these just fine, even though it will give no special meaning to them.

The failure to deal with A2003 files indicates to me that developers really don't have a frigging clue what they are doing. They don't understand that an Access MDB is a Jet MDB with custom properties whose meanings are unknown to Jet, but whose values are still accessible to Jet via the Properties collections of the various Jet objects.

If *I* know this, there is no reason someone who is mucking around trying to reverse engineer read/write access to Jet data stores shouldn't know it.

Either their FAQ is misleading, or these are are rank amateurs whose work should not be trusted with any amount of valuable data.

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David W. Fenton

http://dfenton.com/DFA/