Access Retirement

[Ram]

Hi,

I don't know this is the relevant place or not, but i need information about
Access 97 support.

Can anyone tell me till when Microsoft is going to support Access 95 and 97?
Is there any URL that i can know the timelines when and what product will be
pulled out from the Product support?

I need to upgrade few Access older version applications to the latest. Here
i need to take a call, should i upgrade to Access 2003 or migrate the
databases to SQL2K?

Please someone reply to me. You can directly mail me at
(e-mail address removed)

I need this info to convey my client before EOD today. (15th Nov, 05)

Thanks in advance for your support and sorry if i wrongly posted the msg in
a diff group.

Ram

 

[Brendan Reynolds]

Support (other than self-help online support) for Office 95 and Office 97
has already ended ...

http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifeoffice/

I will not attempt to guess whether you should migrate the databases to SQL
Server or not as I don't have nearly enough information. But note that you
do not have to choose between upgrading the applications to a later version
of Access and migrating the databases to SQL Server - you can, if
appropriate, do both.

 

[Ram]

Basically the migration approach is approved in 2 phases. 1st phase, just
migrate the data which is in Access 97 and move it to SQL 2K and in the
second phase, convert Access Forms to web based forms using C#. For phase 2,
the buegets are allocated in Q1, 2006.

Since i couldn't give more info in my previous mail, thought of sharing the
same now with u.

When i migrate the 97 database, can Access 2000 front end still work with
Jet Engine or i'll have to rewrite the queries and push to SQL as stored
procedures (if i plan to use ADO instead DAO)?

Ram

 

[Brendan Reynolds]

Access can link to SQL Server tables or views via ODBC. This approach will
require fewer changes to the existing applications than other approaches -
and you probably don't want to invest resources in making a lot of changes
to existing applications if they're going to be replaced soon anyway.

 

[Pat Hartman\(MVP\)]

There is no reason to convert existing applications from DAO to ADO. DAO is
still better for Jet tables and with A2003 DAO moved back into place as the
default library.

Converting to A2K is pretty silly with two newer (and FAR better) versions
available and a third to be released next year.

Even if you get to the point of having too much data or too many users for
your data to remain in Jet tables, you don't have to rebuild the front end.
You can simply transfer all the data from Jet to SQL Server or some other
RDBMS and with some changes to the front end, be up and running far faster
than if you had to rebuild the entire application.

There are two problem areas when "upsizing" - column and table names, if you
have used non-professional names, may need to be changed. And - forms must
be modified to use queries with selection criteria as their RecordSources.
If you don't do this, you will not achieve any performance gains because
your forms will just act like data pumps, dragging record after record
across the network until ever record in the RecordSource has been downloaded
to the client PC.