D
David W. Fenton
There's currently a discussion on meta.stackoverflow.com about how
to appropriately tag questions about Jet/ACE. Yesterday, a regular
Access poster retagged a whole bunch of articles that weren't about
Access at all, but just about Jet/ACE with the MS-ACCESS tag. I went
through and where the question did not involve Access at all (but
just the db engine), I removed MS-ACCESS and replaced it with
MS-JET-ACE.
This has resulted in this post considering the issue:
http://tinyurl.com/yaa2n4x =>
http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/33216/ms-access-or-mdb-or-acc
ess-database-engine-or-ms-jet-ace
One very problematic poster who is not an Access-friendly user (he
doesn't really use Access, just complains about Jet/ACE's SQL
dialect because it doesn't perfectly implement SQL 92 or any other
SQL standard) insists that Microsoft has invented the term "Access
database engine" to refer to the ACE and all past versions of Jet. I
think this is ridiculous, even if it *is* MS's policy, as use of Jet
without Access (in, say, an ASP application, or via ODBC) seems a
perverse topic to cover under that Access label.
And, to me, it's the same mistake Microsoft has been making all
alone, which is to obfuscate the distinction between Access the
development tool, and the default database engine that ships with
it. As we all know, Access has a bad reputation among those who are
incapable of or ignorant of the proper way to work with Jet data
stores, with the results that the small, file-based database
engine's reputation for corruption and instability in the hands of
those who don't know what they are doing has caused many people to
conclude that Access as a whole is a toy development tool.
If you're on Stackoverflow, activate your OpenID account on Meta.SO
and post your opinion. I think it's important that the discussion
involve not just those who don't use Access at all, but those of us
who use it all the time.
to appropriately tag questions about Jet/ACE. Yesterday, a regular
Access poster retagged a whole bunch of articles that weren't about
Access at all, but just about Jet/ACE with the MS-ACCESS tag. I went
through and where the question did not involve Access at all (but
just the db engine), I removed MS-ACCESS and replaced it with
MS-JET-ACE.
This has resulted in this post considering the issue:
http://tinyurl.com/yaa2n4x =>
http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/33216/ms-access-or-mdb-or-acc
ess-database-engine-or-ms-jet-ace
One very problematic poster who is not an Access-friendly user (he
doesn't really use Access, just complains about Jet/ACE's SQL
dialect because it doesn't perfectly implement SQL 92 or any other
SQL standard) insists that Microsoft has invented the term "Access
database engine" to refer to the ACE and all past versions of Jet. I
think this is ridiculous, even if it *is* MS's policy, as use of Jet
without Access (in, say, an ASP application, or via ODBC) seems a
perverse topic to cover under that Access label.
And, to me, it's the same mistake Microsoft has been making all
alone, which is to obfuscate the distinction between Access the
development tool, and the default database engine that ships with
it. As we all know, Access has a bad reputation among those who are
incapable of or ignorant of the proper way to work with Jet data
stores, with the results that the small, file-based database
engine's reputation for corruption and instability in the hands of
those who don't know what they are doing has caused many people to
conclude that Access as a whole is a toy development tool.
If you're on Stackoverflow, activate your OpenID account on Meta.SO
and post your opinion. I think it's important that the discussion
involve not just those who don't use Access at all, but those of us
who use it all the time.