Product Reviews
Automate Access Maintenance
Total Visual Agent takes care of the daily chores.
Here's another one for the database developers in the group. Many of
us have developed solutions that use Microsoft Jet databases for storage,
with a variety of front ends -- Access, VC++, or Visual Basic. But how
many of us worry about what happens after the solution is deployed? If
you just wait for the customer to phone you with a problem, you might
consider installing Total Visual Agent instead to give you a proactive
approach to Jet database management.
Total Visual Agent provides you with a scheduling engine and a set of
tools that understand all versions of Jet, from Access 1.0 right forward
to Access 2002. You can schedule actions for execution hourly, daily,
weekly, monthly, or even multiple times per hour. What can you schedule?
Compact and repair cycles, of course, but there's much more. How about
rotating archives (similar to the backup plans constructed by SQL Server's
Maintenance plan wizard)? Or how about just archiving off the data from
critical tables? You can also collect database statistics, run operating
system commands on the database file, or run macros within an Access database.
Jet is pretty well ubiquitous for those of us who use Microsoft operating
systems, but it's often viewed as a toy database. By using Total Visual
Agent, you can add professional data-integrity features to your Jet-based
applications. The peace of mind and the safety of critical backups make
it worth spending the money.
About the Author
Mike Gunderloy, MCSE, MCSD, MCDBA, is a former MCP columnist and the author of numerous development books.