Karsten Hilbert wrote: > > I just came across this post on a German debian mailing list. > Now, this is all hearsay so we need to take it with at least a > grain of salt but if it is true it would be a first-hand > account: > > [German] -------8<------snip------8<---------- > > Basically, what this person claims is that while being > dialysed at a German hospital for a nicotin allergy (s)he was > going to get erroneous medication due to MS ACCESS 97 linking > a wrong medication record to her identity record. > > A link to the archived post is here: > http://www.infodrom.org/Mail-Archive/debian-user-de/2000/05/0427.html > > We certainly need to get verifyable software into our hands.
This has the hallmarks of an urban myth - I may be ignorant but nicotine allergy seems unlikely, and being dialysed for it even more so. However, there was a big stink a few years ago when someone claimed they had discovered a fundamental flaw in the Jet database engine, which is what MS Access uses for its storage. It turned out that the "problem" was caused by the programmers in question treating the Jet engine as if it were a much simpler dBase-style ISAM data store and thus assuming that records would always be in the same order as they were when they were added. In fact, the Jet engine is much more sophisticated than that and it constantly re-organises records internally - it only guarantees that results obtained via SQL statements will be correct - if you bypass SQL you might be surprised. Thus, I suspect that the problem related in this story, if true, is caused by the programmers doing a join between tables using direct programmatic access to the Jet tables and bypassing the SQL interface. I dimly recall a note in a Microsoft knowledgebase about this very issue. However, your point about the need for verifiability is a good one. However, this need is most urgent in custom-built vertical-market applications which have a relatively small number of users, rather than in underlying tools (such as MS Access) which have millions of users pounding away at them. Now, back to raking up dead leaves around my house (fuel reduction)... Tim C Sydney, Australia
