MS Access 97 stability

Question

... "the simple act of adding one line of code to a module in Access, which then compiles without complaint can result in the mdb file becoming corrupt and Access issuing a Page fault the next time the file is loaded." Any one care to comment on that real issue?

Answer

From: Shamil Salakhetdinov <shamil@marta.darts.spb.ru>
To: ACCESS-L <ACCESS-L@PEACH.EASE.LSOFT.COM>
Subject: Re: Access '00 Wish List - is there life after paranoia?
Date: 31 August 1998 0:51

Lambert,

I try to comment but it's Friday today - so take it easy ;-)

I use Access 97 in real life apps since it was released in January 1997 (before that I used last beta since October 1996). I wrote during this period more than 50+ small and big app .mdbs on it running on Win95 and WinNT 4.0 - English, Russian and German versions of both OS and Access - so I don't know how much thousand times during this period I opened my app's .mdb to do some edits and save them:
- yes it can GPF when in debug mode;
- yes it looses sometimes last edited and *saved* line;
- yes I have one large app (converted from Acc2.0) which I cannot compile into .MDE;
- yes it has bugs...

but

- I write to registry (add, update.delete) from MS Access sometimes several times a day while debugging profile and never had problems;
- only one time during this period I got corrupted app .mdb but this was when I used large app which code was compiled and saved, then I stopped app on breakpoint, did some edits and tried to save it - then I got corrupted .mdb but I was able to import all the objects except one module (I always have last day backup - I got this module from it;
- and if I do a lot of changes I usually backup app .mdbs several times a day but I never used such backups with Access 97)...;
- we are four working with MS Access for more than one year now - one of us - lucky man - *one time* managed to get corrupted mdb which he was unable to import objects from and he hadn't backups during several days, another time he lost several days work because of HDD crash and again he hadn't backups - is this MS Access 97's, hardware's or his problem?

Access 97 isn't free of bugs as any complicated modern software but when you get some experience programming on it these bugs do not harm your work ... And I did some crash tests with Access 97 apps forcing them to run several hours extensively processing all the objects and their properties of my apps + using Automation - no problems, I wrote a function which I used to automatically replace code templates  in VBA modules of 20+ .mdbs - no problems, I wrote a test which worked in multi-user environment for three days from 4 PCs - even "cold" reboot of file server PC with data .mdb didn't make harm to MS Access 97 apps running on another PCs - they just logged file server MDB unavailability and continued to work OK after its reboot and we make batch compile of our apps into .mdes - no problems, and we automaticllay build one app .mdb from several component .mdbs - no problems, and we did a lot of other crash tests - *no problems* - I hope this is enough to say that MS Access 97 is stable enough to "pardon" it its bugs...

Best wishes,
Shamil