DAO 3.60 and Jet 4 - July 1999 and December 2000

Now that Access 2000 is reaching the market I figured I better learn something about it. My findings become the tip-of-the-month. I am currently traveling the United States in a motor coach and smooching off friends and relatives. Click here for some photos with narrative. This tip is being written from my sister's home in Fairfax Station, VA - lovely wooded area about 30 miles west of Washington, DC.

The Demo Program

I wrote a VB6 demo program that creates a Jet 4 database. The program:

Dependencies

In order to run this program I found that I needed the following files:

File	Register It	Comment
DAO360.DLL	Yes	VB Typelib
MSJET40.DLL	Yes	Jet 4 Engine
MSWSTR10.DLL	Don't Think So	Jet 4 Sort

I located DAO360.DLL in MSDN CD 23 'Microsoft Office 2000 Developer' of the 'Office Test Platform & Development Tools' series. MSJET40.DLL and MSWSTR10.DLL were installed as part of the Office 2000 installation [I think]. I found the easiest way to register files is to create a short cut to RegSvr32.exe on my desktop then drag the file name and drop it onto the shortcut.

Download MDAC

2000/12/24 - You can download the DLL's as part of Microsoft Data Access Components [MDAC].

Is DAO 3.6 Installed

I wrote a routine to determine if DAO 3.6 is installed on the user's machine. The source is included in the downloadable file. Look for 'modIsDAO360OnThisMachine.bas'. It uses RegRead - for details see: Functions RegRead and RegWrite.

What I Learned

Open with Access 97 - If you attempt to open a Jet 4 database with Access 97 you'll get a message similar to:

File Size Doubles - Because data is now stored in Unicode rather than ANSI format the database size almost doubles. One database I converted went from 1,332 kb to 2,196 kb.

Backward Compatible - I ran one rather large application using DAO 3.6 and it seemed to run fine. We will not be using DAO 3.6 for awhile- probably will wait till the next major revision of the application or until users 'demand' that we support Access 2000.

Download VB Code

Click here to download the VB 6 Source Code [3k].