What provider to use for MS access

[donnacha]

Hi folks,

I am using VB and ms-access in an application and have used the provider Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;. This works fine. Now I have recently tried to deploy the application on windows 2000 machine and it failed because the machine had MDAC 2.5. I have been looking at the MDAC 2.6/2.7 versions and they indicate that the Jet OLEdb provider is not included any more. It needs to be added seperately.

 

To avoid this problem, is there another provider that can be used instead and are there any drawbacks of it.

 

Thanks for any help

[Robby]

No that's it, you'll have to include JET 4.0 along with MDAC 2.6/2.7.

 

Look on the bright side 2.6 and 2.7 are smaller files than 2.5.

[donnacha]

What a pain, why do Microsoft do this to us!!!

 

Can I use a different provider other than Jet 4.0 for MS-Access.

I have tried one or two other providers a while ago ant they did not work, then Jet worked, so I never investigated any further.

[Nerseus]

I would definitely use Jet to access Access - it's what Jet was made for.

 

On the bright side, you only have to create a setup script once. :)

 

-Nerseus

[Robby]

Why did Microsoft do this?.

It may be redundant to include JET for 2.6/2.7 because the JET version had not changed and most people only need 2.5 for Access while 2.6/2.7 will be used primarily for SQL Server. Maybe. :)

[spebola]

This is a good article from the KB on ADO.Net data providers.

Read the section on OLE DB providers.

 

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnadonet/html/adonetbest.asp