On 7/26/07, Bill Sconce <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 1. It seems to me that someone (who probably knows who he is) told me a > week or so ago that for a certain period Microsoft intended withdraw Access > from the market.
I highly doubt it. Access is one of Microsoft's cash cows, and key element in their hold on the market. Getting rid of Access would be akin to getting rid of Excel or Word. What you may be thinking of is that Microsoft's intention is to eventually discontinue use of their "Jet Red" database engine. Jet Red is the database storage engine underling Access today, as frequently seen as ".MDB files". It's been around for ever, in Access and in MDAC (the embedded database technology that's part of Windows and/or Visual Studio, depending on who you asked and what year it was). Microsoft eventually wants to replace use of Jet Red with whatever MS-SQL uses. Right now, Access can talk to MS-SQL as an ODBC client, but doesn't really provide anything overwhelmingly special when used with MS-SQL. Access does just about the same sort of stuff if connected to, say, Oracle. Microsoft naturally wants Access and MS-SQL to be more tightly coupled, so they can take leverage that in the market. There's also Jet Blue. Jet Blue, also known as ESE (Extensible Storage Engine), is the engine behind Exchange, Active Directory, and various other systemy things. However, I don't think MS-SQL uses Jet Blue; I think it uses something else. There was supposedly an effort inside Microsoft to adopt MS-SQL as the storage backend for Exchange, but they found it didn't work very well for that. (Same situation as with MySQL and it's various database engines: One size does not fit all.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISAM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Jet_Database_Engine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Storage_Engine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_SQL_Server > 2. I've heard conflicting opinions as to whether Jet (the "database engine" > shipped with Access) is a relational engine or ...(only) ISAM... My understanding is that "ISAM" and "relational" aren't strictly exclusive elements in a single problem domain. ISAM is a general method of implementation database storage, characterized by fixed record sizes and external indexes. "Relational" gets (ab)used for various meanings. It generally seems to mean that tables are at least somewhat normalized, and reference each other by unique keys. ISAM can be used to implement that, and Access can do that. OTOH, by the strict original definition, I guess almost none of today's databases are "true" relational databases. Access certainly isn't. But neither is MySQL. (I think. I'm not a member of the Church of Codd, so I can really only repeat what I've been told by the faithful.) I suspect the question is really only useful only for penis length competitions anyway ("My database is bigger than your database!"). ;-) It's more useful to look at features. MS Access does support enforced relationships between tables, with cascading updates and deletes. It supports a SQL dialect (not ANSI SQL), including LEFT, RIGHT, and INNER JOIN, but not OUTER or FULL. Nested JOINs are also rather limited in Access. So Access has some of it, but it isn't PostgreSQL. Hope this helps, -- Ben _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
