If you're not going to be taking advantage of the Unicode
availability in Access 2003 (it was introduced in Access 2000),
there really isn't any driving reason to convert. You will be able
to store more data in the newer format (the size limit increases
to 2 Gb from 1 Gb), but since Unicode takes 2 bytes instead of 1
byte, that doesn't actually equal a doubling in capacity.
If you're not going to run a mixed front end environment (i.e., A97
and A2K3), then I see no reason *not* to convert the back end to A2K
(not A2K3 -- A2K3 is irrelevant for a back end, because you're not
using Access features of the MDB, only Jet). I believe that using
the same Jet version does improve performance.
I had an app that was converted from Access 2 to A2K that I was
developing for in A97 and I kept the back end in A97 after we
encountered some corruption issues using A2K format (this was the
bad old days of 2000-01, before Jet 4 SP 6). The A97 (i.e., Jet 3.5)
back end was very, very stable and uncorruptable. Eventually, we
moved to an A2K back end to eek out the last little bits of
performance and as long as we kept all the workstations properly
"service packed" for Jet and Access, it worked like a treat. And
there really was a performance gain, particularly in retrieving
relatively large recordsets.
