Microsoft sends a raft of Windows 10 patches out into the Windows Update ocean Microsoft has released a second raft of fixes for Windows 10 following the monthly Patch Tuesday excitement last week. It has also issued some fixes for its latest Windows Insider build. The latest tokens of affection from the gang at Redmond come in the form of KB4480976, KB4480967 and KB4480959, which cover the 1803, 1709 …
A different Jet. There were two streams of Jet - Jet Red was the Access database, and Jet Blue was the enterprise variant used in Active Directory and Exchange Server (amongst other products).
Jet Blue became ESE (Extensible Storage Engine), and is very different to Jet Red - in that it's actually reliable and half decent.
Fun fact - sharing a database engine is why Small Business Server died. The AD team and Exchange team used different versions of Jet Blue/ESE. Neither liked the idea of being forced to upgrade to a later version of it because of the other team, and it made support difficult as patching one product might break the other.
This is why it's not at all supported to install Exchange on your AD controllers - it will likely result in issues with your mail databases or - worse - your AD database.
"And how", as they say in the classics. I seem to remember msdhcp using some kind of jet database.
Back to the point though, quite a few db's are small enough where dbase is sufficient. I hear MS ODBC does a pretty good job with dbase files too. And the advantage over MSAccess (97) databases is that you can actually list your tables!
That's what they tell me anyway.
"sharing a database engine is why Small Business Server died"
I do not think that is the reason that it died - there are far better reasons. Customers bought it once and then stuck with it for many years without upgrading (often out of fear) - not enough built in obsolescence. It was too hard to upgrade from. I recently did one and getting to Exch 2016 from 2007 involved an intermediate migration to 2010 and the full horror of each step. Took ages.
It didn't have a great upgrade path anyway (at least the earlier versions that I had seen). Once you went one over the max user/device limit it all became expensive and messy. As the typical admin of an SBS may not be used to multi-server environments it meant that the upgrade often left remnants of SBS around forever more.
Anyway wasn't SBS rename Server Essentials and dropped the 'exchange' component?
Any upgrades I've ever done of Exchange involve installing the new version on new hardware or a new virtual machine, then to transfer data across, I backup each individual mailbox in Outlook and restore onto the new server.
Doing an actual in-place upgrade seems to be just asking for trouble.
Its very unliely you would do an inplace upgrade of Exchange as the versions are generally tied to an OS, 2010 for example only works on 2008r2, 2013 on 2012r2 and 2016 on 2016.
The chances of something not working after an OS upgrade and Exchange upgrade is so large it would fall in to the category of seeing how much of a mess you could make of it and possibly AD as well. Apocolypse springs to mind.
Far better to just have good backups and migrate mailboxes to a shiny new server, no down time and nothing will break. Honest.
By upgrade I meant upgrade from SBS to non-SBS multi server style when you get employee number x (pushed you over the SBS licence limit) joined your company. Then the self-trained IT guru of the company (the MDs Nephew) would have to take on the role of a system admin and try to learn about proper stuff.
"What could possibly go wrong?"
AD supports atomic transactions and full transaction logging with multiple copies and snapshots with roll back. As well as a last known good copy. It's pretty hard to corrupt AD at the database level. As well as performance its one of the reasons it's so much better a solution than text files.
Been there, done that. (The dreaded "USN Rollback" message in the event log, along with the afflicted domain controller absolutely *refusing* to authenticate anyone not logging locally.)
ESE isn't all that bad, considering it's roots. the heaviest use I've seen is down in the very core of Exchange; there's an ESE instance for each mailbox database a mailbox server has, and anyone who's dealt with a busy exchange server knows it gets pounded on hard by it's users.
"Been there, done that. (The dreaded "USN Rollback" message in the event log, along with the afflicted domain controller absolutely *refusing* to authenticate anyone not logging locally.)"
That's pretty rare though - usually a corrupt disk or something extreme. So you just set a reg key, reboot, and it will update from another DC. Or demote / promote it.
nope- There was a small business I went to once in 2002; the 'server' they were using was a windows 3.11 for workgroup machine acting as a file server and I think a database server for some in-house app they had build on dBase or FoxPro for windows.
(After I did what I could there, which was also advising that customer to upgrade to something that's at least year 2000 compliant, I let the bosses know that I didn't want to go back there.)
That is hell.
It was never acceptable to use Access. Otoh, in its time it provided a relational view of your database which was pretty rare. And the OLE2 format allowing for the bundling of multiple streams--making a copy of your database became CTRL+C & CTRL+V (obviously with NT mandatory locking). If they only had a 'show tables' command I'd probably seldom need anything else (as I mentioned above).
They got embedded in all kinds of products thanks to VB and you know the old saying — if ain't broke don't fix it — well, some of the boxes will be running those systems because there is no easy alternative as the supplier is no longer in business. I'm sure there's still a reasonable base of DOS-based systems for similar reasons.
Back when MS hadn't jumped onto the class library naming shenanigans and had a simple interface to COM, instead of a roundabout one (aka .NET) and made no apologies for it not being CORBA...well I lost my hate for VB some time after they ditched it.
And boy did they ditch it.
Yes,
Access 97 was (is) great for simple databases with the newer versions slower and clunky. With MS Office 97, VBA and VB 5 one could easily and inexpensively get a hell of a lot of useful work done with no apologies for not being a "real" programmer. I am still studying C (OK, so I'm old) and have a great admiration for programming as a profession but, since I wasn't getting paid to "be a programmer", I used the tools at hand with great success. Too bad jerks, a**holes and other neer do well script kiddies have made these programs (and most others even today) a hell hole of security risks.
jvf
I finally gave up and upgraded my Windows 10 machine. To Linux.
If you're a non-Microsoft developer then you'd be amazed at the amount of stuff that doesn't work properly under Win10. If all you do is Office and Web then Win10 will work OK but the rest of the time its just pure frustration, made worse by the inevitable 'antivirus' solutions. I've been struggling with MSFT's offerings on and off since 1985 and they're still making the same basic mistakes that they made back then with MS-DOS. Now I'm more or less retired I can just decline to have anything further to do with this shambolic heap of code.
Not really. I came from an Rdb, Informix, Oracle, Sybase, etc background. Access 97 was fine if you were a professional developer. It’s problems often came from the failure/i ntransigence/l ack of resources of larger organizations’ IT departments - Users just wanted to put together something to get a “simple” job done. The job then became mission-critical and was required to be adequately supported, that’s when “professionals” were brought in - The professionals were (usually rightly) horrified as to what had been produced.
We would use Access 97 to prototype systems for small/medium businesses as we could quickly develop something to show how it might/would work. One customer said that what we had produced seemed to work, so why couldn’t he use what he had seen rather than wait for us to produce a “proper” system - So we looked at what he was trying to do and realised that if we split the system so that the data was separate from the user interface/forms/reports it would be robust enough for his 10 user $2million dollar business. We had already produced a range of single-user shrink-wrap solutions that went back to Access 2.0. I am retired now, but the company still has many hundreds of customers who use Access based applications (The bigger/multi-user ones have a SQL Server backend, but the interface forms and reports are still separate Access clients for each user - These are OK for tens of million rows of data and at least 50 concurrent users, the server does the heavy lifting and Access gives a nice friendly interface).
The historical background of Access is that it owes a lot to MicroRim’s R:Base from the 1980s: Wikipedia link. Microsoft used to sell R:Base with their own sticker in Europe, and when MicroRim got into financial difficulties developing a VAX based product, Microsoft acquired a number of their staff that helped produce Access 1.0, and then Access 1.1 which included Access Basic. Access 2.0 ran on Windows 3.1 was quite fast (contained a fair amount of assembler?) and generally worked fairly well unless the PC crashed/was powered off with an open database. Access 95 was a major rewrite (all in C?) and available as part of the Microsoft Office Professional suite - It ran like a badly crippled dog for anything but a very simple application. Access 97 worked (Very well, if you knew what you were doing).
NOOOOOPE. No way. Nu-uh. Ni-hai. Nein. Heck no.
I'll be a dynamo in hell before I let general pop test an OS update...
Unless you're flush with cash AND time AND space AND can set up a test lab, off on its own segmented network where any thing that goes wrong won't kill anything, there is no way in any hell an "Enterprise Customer" (Read: Businesses) will or should be installing test builds regularly.
Best practices aside, it's support suicide. I for one am *very* glad of the fact that there's a six-month delay on "patches" being issued to general pop now. It at least means I can research, properly test and roll back any "features" before it goes out worldwide to the company. Meaning less angry* emails, phone calls and walk-ups for me.
(*angry=idiotic)
Ah. Yes. I remember it well; well vaguely. I'm older than some of the dirt in my garden. . .composting being another gift that keeps on giving.
I remember Access as the proximate cause of losing one of my best employees. He was an undergraduate IT intern at the time, exceptionally bright, and fluent in English, Japanese, and German.
We had a contract that specified a database deliverable in Access that he was assigned to work on.
The data base was largely comprised of blocks of text. I don't recall the details, but the functionality required that sometimes the data element needed to be handled as a variable, and sometime as the literal text string. (Apologies. I'm not sure that "string variables" are even a term in use anymore. At this point I had already gone from being an engineer to being a system engineer--a function for which customers were willing to pay handsomely despite it being, as we used to say back on the farm, "as useless as tits on a boar hog.)
The bottom line was that the coding didn't always work as described in the documentation. As deadlines neared, angst increased, and he appealed to me for help.
I believe I mentioned I was older than dirt? Twenty years of programming, one develops an intuitive feel for things. I hadn't been a system engineer that long at this point, and some real skills were still in the memory bank.
The short version is that under some conditions, some functions would work with the data element variable name; others required the literal string enclosed in quotation marks. It appeared that the program at times performed manipulations that converted from literal string to a variable name, such that in some cases, the documentation showed literal strings enclosed in two sets of quotations.
Being old school, I did the trial and error thing, eventually generating a matrix of the diverse functions, and where, when, and how many sets of quotations the data base software required and did block search and replace on the code. (If aging memory is correct, four or five was the max I needed to get a function to actually work.)
The intern demanded to know "how did you know that would work?" He was not satisfied with a shrug.
Unfortunately, by the 1990's IT professionals were already fully indoctrinated fundamentalists, with unshakeable faith in the inerrant infallibility of "the system." It was apparent that he was firmly convinced that I was withholding information and was just messing with him by telling him that I didn't--that it was just trial and error.
We made him an offer for full time employment when he graduated, at a rate that left no profit margin on our negotiated contract rate. A local government laboratory offered him $5K more per year plus a 5K bonus before graduation, so maybe his Access Angst wasn't the problem.
Access. You know those human evolution pictures, ape to Neanderthal to: yeah you know. Well, I've been using Access since 1.0. Yes, the one that didn't work, then 1.1 that worked if you begged for 8 megabytes of RAM...and it was all I could get after dBase IV so cut me some slack! So back to the evolution metaphor. Access 2010 represented the peak of evolution, thing is, I could get stuff done with it...and then came Access 2013.
Access 2013 is the Devo of Databases. Clearly Microsoft thought so little of the program that they said "We need to throw out a new version of Access for Office 2013. Here, Booji Boy, see what you can do with it!"
So now I'm learning R.
Actually, come to think of it...
"Are we not men?"
"We are Microsoft."
This explains a lot...
I found that the update ruined my printer connection and because the thing had stopped administrator my printer settings all went to cock and also altered the way the colours were attributed. After several conversations with MS, a complete new reload, and still no colour correction this being over 5 days, I discovered that as my colour was not correct that my screen colours were no longer correct and had to manually reset them. I wasted 5 days, it must have cost MS $1000's just for mine all due to someone's incompetence. Had I not my Win 7 computer as well then I would have been "dans le merde". Pleas MS get your act together or at least give us a chance to resort to our last trouble free version, in my case 7.
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