MS Access help

murphey

Touchdown! Greaser!
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murphey
I’ve got an old-ish Access program...at least I think it’s Access...only runs on windows. Predefined front-end. I need to get to the back-end DB to write better reports than what’s there. I haven’t found the original authors, either.

What are the magic ways to get into the system? Anyone got any ideas? I’ve tried opening it from Access with no luck. I’m an Oracle/MySQL geek, not Access.
 
beyond opening the mdb file in access I assume?

if it pops a UI annoyingly, you might need to ... either hit F11 or open the thing while holding F11? -- it's been awhile.

You might prefer to just use it as an ODBC data source and suck the data and schema into something easier to reason about.
 
I used to work with Access apps, but it was a long time ago. Used to be you could distribute a runtime and then the database was in a different format, .mde vs mdb I think. Since then there may be others. If it's not an mbd, I'd suggest writing a change to it, then see which file changes, then search for whatever file extension it is. If it's an mde you might get lucky, and then you just have to explicitly tell access to link to it. If you're just looking to do reports, and you have access, I'd create a new access database, then link tables into your existing database. Manually create queries to get the data you want, and create reports against those queries. Then you have low risk of modifying your original database by accident. You're an Oracle guy, so you get sql already...I'd avoid the goofy wizards, they are just confusing and get in the way. Oh, I will say that the visual way of creating a query, selecting tables and then dropping down fields is pretty intuitive and quick. It will then let you see the actual sql, and if you don't modify it too much you can get the visual view, too.

There was a way to lock this down with some sort of encryption at the time - I think - so you may have to work around that. I would bet that's not too likely, but pointing out as an option if it's a health or financial app and it was implemented that way.
 
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