The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 3 (of 5)

Does Jet Use BTrieve?

While looking up the errors codes for ADO/DAO and Access, I discovered some that mention BTrieve. I was always under the impression that Jet used it's own proprietary ISAM/KSAM engine. Does anyone know if Jet uses BTrieve or does it use it's own data access engine? Or is it simply that Jet can read Btrieve files?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/off2000/html/acexaAccessJetErrorCodesX.asp

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Dave B.
Friday, October 31, 2003

I think some of those error descriptions would lead you to believe that Jet uses the BTrieve engine, but I think it's more likely that Jet simply uses the BTrieve driver for BTrieve files sort of like the ODBC data source driver for ODBC data sources and the OLE DB data source driver for OLE DB data sources... of course I could be wrong.

Friday, October 31, 2003

Btrieve is fairly proprietary with no independent vendor implementations in the wild. Every Btrieve comptible product I've ever seen required separate Btrieve drivers.

Many vendors have their own dBase-compatible access drivers, for instance, but I would bet that Jet's approach is to require you to purchase and install Btrieve separately.

Bored Bystander
Friday, October 31, 2003

Way back in the days of Access 1 and 2, a set of BTrieve drivers were supplied in the box. The BTrieve specific error messages were built into the error table at that point and haven't been removed.

JET does use its own ISAM database engine. It also handles 'Installable ISAMs' which are *NOT* ODBC drivers. This is how Access used to read DBase and FoxPro files slightly more efficiently than it could have using ODBC.

I remember they dropped the BTrieve drivers at some point, probably before Access 95.

Craig
Friday, October 31, 2003

Thanks Craig. That explains it.

Dave B.
Friday, October 31, 2003