[thelist] Database Licensing Question

Ken Schaefer Ken at adOpenStatic.com
Tue Dec 21 05:55:18 CST 2004


User does not need Access to connect to an .mdb file. All you need to Jet
OLEDB or ODBC driver. That's included for "free" with the OS

If the user does have Access, and does upgrade Access, that generally does
not affect the .mdb file in any way, unless they want to open the file in
Access and choose to upgrade the format. That said, there are only really two
formats at the moment: Jet v3 (Access95/97 and I think Access 2000) and Jet
v4 (Access XP and Access 2003), so it's not as if every new version of Access
changes the Jet engine.

I would look at MSDE - that's pretty much free to use, and you can
redistribute it if you have Visual Studio etc.

Cheers
Ken

: -----Original Message-----
: From: thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org [mailto:thelist-
: bounces at lists.evolt.org] On Behalf Of Burhan Khalid
: Sent: Tuesday, 21 December 2004 7:42 PM
: To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
: Subject: [thelist] Database Licensing Question
: 
: Hello All:
: 
:    I'm going to be writing an application that will be using a database
: to store some information and print reports.  The application will be
: closed source, and its for sale to a client.
: 
:    Now, the issue is with the database backend that I will use.  MySQL,
: if I read the licensing page correctly, will require me to purchase a
: commercial license because the product is closed source.
: 
:    Since the database is nothing complex (and really, nothing that
: warrants MySQL), I was thinking of other alternatives.  The first thing
: that popped in my mind was Access and mdb files.
: 
:    Since I'm new to Access as a backend, I have a few questions :
: 
:    1. Does the end user need to have a copy of Access installed for my
: application to be able to use mdb files?
: 
:    2. If the end user decides to upgrade Access, will this affect my
: application in anyway?
: 
:    3. Any other issues I should be aware of?
: 
:    Does someone have any suggestions for other database backends that I
: can research?  The coding language has not been decided yet, but it will
: be a tossup between .NET (C#) and Java.



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