Thanks, Dmitry. I thought that position had later been modified by
Microsoft, but it appears that I was wrong. In view of this statement, the
MDAC needed is MDAC 2.5.
I can tell you that a lot of people are still trying to convince Microsoft
that Jet should be resuscitated and brought back to life. I am under the
impression that, despite the warning of no more service packs, there have
been at least one, perhaps more, service packs since that decision was made
when MDAC 2.6 was released, and there has been talk of a SP 8 to be made
available around the official release data of Office 2003. (None of the
preceding is "secret" or "inside" information, of course. It has all been
published in one place or another.)
Microsoft's "deprecation" of OLE DB support for Jet seemed to coincide with
classic ADO being replaced in their thoughts with ADO.NET which uses a
different object model, and which is the access method of choice in .NET.
But Office 2003 and the next version of Office have been stated to continue
to support Jet.
Microsoft's "deprecation" of Jet itself didn't make sense to me until I read
(again, published information) that the Operating System release codenamed
Longhorn would have a file system based on SQL Server. That would mean that
the user would not, as now, have to separately install MSDE. Just how
user-friendly for novice and casual users it would be to create end-user
databases that access SQL-Server-like files, I couldn't guess, but in my
observation, it's very, very easy for them to do so with Access and the
automatically-installed, automatically-used Jet database engine.
