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ms-accessadp

Access Data Project (ADP) - Access 2007 or 2003?


I have been tasked with writing an ADP application using Access. The back-end data will be stored in SQL Server. We have SQL Server 2000, 2005, and 2008 available to us. Requirements dictate that Access must be used but I may have a choice of using Access 2003 or Access 2007. My first thought was to push for Access 2007, because it was newer and we could use SQL Server 2005 or perhaps 2008, however, when searching the web for Access 2007 and ADP I find a lot of posts from people saying the speed is very slow and they are running into lots of problems getting Access 2007 running with ADP.

If you had the choice of using Access 2003 or Access 2007 for an Access Database Project which one would you go with and why? Thanks.


Solution

  • Personally, I find Office 2007 to be ok, but the Access 2007 UI really gets me frustrated! The object text search feature is useful, but I miss being able to see a full list of objects, with descirption.

    As to the data side of things, if you have a free choice, I'd use a MDB file and link to SQLServer using ODBC linked tables, rather than use a ADP. Apparently, ADPs are deprecated as they are less efficient. See the comments here. Here's an excerpt:

    But not going through Jet is a drawback, because Jet is so smart and efficient. ADO has terrible problems (like bypassing views and going direct to the underlying tables for otherwise unupdatable DML commands) and ADPs turn out to have more layers between them and the data than MDBs with ODBC. This is why MS has been deprecating ADPs in favor of MDB/ODBC for about 5 years now.