Speed Ferret usage

D

dragon lady

I have an Access 2003 DB that has lots of issues, one of which is a linked
table to a DB that someone somewhere along the line has locked exclusively
and I cannot open it. The MDW file does not exist. Has anyone used Speed
Ferret to find and fix problems with exclusive locks? Also I understand
Speed Ferret requires a copy of Access 2002 to run - can I install Access
2002 on a Windows 2003 server?

Any help is greatly appreciated!
 
L

Larry Linson

dragon lady said:
I have an Access 2003 DB that has lots of issues, one of which is a linked
table to a DB that someone somewhere along the line has locked exclusively
and I cannot open it. The MDW file does not exist. Has anyone used Speed
Ferret to find and fix problems with exclusive locks? Also I understand
Speed Ferret requires a copy of Access 2002 to run - can I install Access
2002 on a Windows 2003 server?

Any help is greatly appreciated!

I do not believe either Speed Ferret nor the competitive product, Find and
Replace, www.rickworld.com, will modify a database without permissions. You
need to search because there is at least one software product (free, if I
remember correctly) that will break security even without the MDW, at least
through Access 2003, if I'm not mistaken.

I'm sorry, but I just will not post a link to such a product in a public
forum. Probably I'm being overcautious because I can't imagine any
knowledgeable Access developer relying on Access security to really protect
their database... given that it's been easily breakable since Access 2.0
days... but overcautious or not, you'll have to find it on your own or from
someone else.

Larry Linson
Microsoft Office Access MVP
 
D

De Jager

dragon lady said:
I have an Access 2003 DB that has lots of issues, one of which is a linked
table to a DB that someone somewhere along the line has locked exclusively
and I cannot open it. The MDW file does not exist. Has anyone used Speed
Ferret to find and fix problems with exclusive locks? Also I understand
Speed Ferret requires a copy of Access 2002 to run - can I install Access
2002 on a Windows 2003 server?

Any help is greatly appreciated!
 
P

(PeteCresswell)

Per Larry Linson:
I do not believe either Speed Ferret nor the competitive product, Find and
Replace, www.rickworld.com, will modify a database without permissions. You
need to search because there is at least one software product (free, if I
remember correctly) that will break security even without the MDW, at least
through Access 2003, if I'm not mistaken.

Either way, I'd advise anybody who is thinking of buying Speed
Ferret to give "Find and Replace" a test drive.

I've tried Ferret, been using Find/Replace for at least 10 years
and, IMHO, there is no comparison in speed/convenience: Rick's
tool wins hands-down.
 
D

David W. Fenton

Per Larry Linson:

Either way, I'd advise anybody who is thinking of buying Speed
Ferret to give "Find and Replace" a test drive.

I've tried Ferret, been using Find/Replace for at least 10 years
and, IMHO, there is no comparison in speed/convenience: Rick's
tool wins hands-down.

I would say just the opposite. I purchased Rick's product recently
because Speed Ferret is not keeping up with current versions of
Access (I have used the A97 version since 1999), and to me, there's
no comparison whatsoever. Speed Ferret is much more powerful and
much more granular in its ability to control what is found and what
is replaced.

I actually use Rick's utility less than I use a utility called MDB
Search that was created by "Ucora and Jamie Horenstein." It has its
rough edges, but works quite well for most of the operations I use
one of these tools for. Unfortunately, it's no longer available so
far as any of my Googling can determine.

Another option that I recently used in a case where I'd have used
Speed Ferret if I'd had a version that worked with A2003 is to
temporarily turn on Name AutoCorrect. I found this extremely
helpful, but the one limitation of it is that you have to do the
changes manually through the UI -- code changes don't get processed
by the Name AutoCorrect engine. But it did save me a lot of time in
an app where I had to remove Leszinsky-Reddick prefixes from field
names. To help with that, I created this little utility (very rough
-- I did just enough UI on it so I could use it myself):

http://dfenton.com/DFA/download/Access/DataRename.zip

It does three things:

1. removes lookup fields.

2. renames fields from a model to a target (useful for copying
changes from your test database to the production copy without
needing to write reams of complicated DDL that creates new fields,
appends the data then deletes the original field).

3. renames tables.

4. copies relationships.

This allowed me to make changes to my test database on my PC, then
take a copy of that and propagate all the changes to the production
database in about an hour. It was a pretty extensive set of changes
and writing code to do it in a completely automated fashion would
have taken days. The code behind that utility didn't take much time
at all. I'm sure there are things wrong with it, and bugs and all,
but it saved me a lot of time with something I have to do in
practically every existing project I take over (i.e., ones that I
wasn't responsible for designing/implementing). None of the
search/replace tools could do what I needed reliably enough that I
could get by without creating this little utility.
 
J

Jerry Martin

David W. Fenton said:
But it did save me a lot of time in
an app where I had to remove Leszinsky-Reddick prefixes from field
names.

Hello:

This will sound like a naive question, but what is the advantage of removing
the Leszinsky-Reddick prefixes?

Is their use no longer recommended?

Thanks,
Jerry
 
L

Larry Linson

Jerry Martin said:
This will sound like a naive question, but
what is the advantage of removing
the Leszinsky-Reddick prefixes?

There's never been total agreement on using a naming convention, whether
L-R, or other, so it wouldn't be a matter of "no longer recommended" unless
you were talking about the recommendation of a particular individual. I tend
to use the Reddick convention with variables, Access objects, and Controls
but not on Fields in Tables, but MVP Tony Toews does not use them, and we
each think well of the other's development ability.

I don't know what the reason is, in David's situation, but I can imagine
some different scenarios in which it would be beneficial to either add or
delete naming convention prefixes.

Larry Linson
Microsoft Office Access MVP
 
D

David W. Fenton

This will sound like a naive question, but what is the advantage
of removing the Leszinsky-Reddick prefixes?

Is their use no longer recommended?

I don't think they've ever been recommended by anyone for fields in
data tables. They make it awfully inconvenient to navigate lists of
fields, for one, but it's not really information that is needed,
seems to me.

In code, I use my own version of them fairly consistently, but I
don't go all the way with it. I also use them for names of tables,
queries, reports, macros and modules, though not the standard
prefixes in all cases.

But for field names, it just makes no sense to me whatsoever.
 

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