Access Jet or Libre drivers for latest windows servers

What kind of compatibility from 2003?

[dstiles]

Due to the MS expiries on XP and 2003 I have to upgrade to a new Windows server, probably 2008, maybe 2012, running ASP Classic (NOT .NET).

Most of the sites on the 2003 server run Access 2000 databases (currently constrained to that due to offline development hardware/software). A few sites use MySQL.

I can probably find a way to update to whatever Access version the new server runs (or convert to MySQL) since it's a one-off conversion that will remain online but one db is regenerated monthly by a client who will still be running Access 2000 on XP (not an internet-facing machine!). That db is uploaded to the web site per generation.

I'm trying to find a "simple" way to convert from Access 2000 mdb to whatever the new one is whenever the database is regenerated. Since there is no actual Access front-end on the web server (just Jet) I'm probably going to have to do the conversion locally and then upload it: tricky because I only have a Windows 2000 server here (off-line) plus several linux machines.

Options so far considered:

1. Export locally to CSV and import online, probably via a custom ASP script (the database is not large but has a couple of tables). This method would also allow me to use MySQL instead of Jet.

2. Find a Libre Base ODBC (or other) driver compatible with ASP Classic, convert locally from Access to Libre using CSV and then upload (probably not possible - haven't found a suitable driver yet!).

3. Retire from business!

Any other suggestions or solutions, please?

[Ocean10000]

Are you going to run the website in 32 bit mode, if you are you can keep running with the access db as it is still supported that way in windows 2008. You can have a 64 bit machine and run a web application in 32 bit mode.

Long term you probably want to rewrite the website moving away from Classic asp to either PHP, or Asp.net.

I am assuming the database is for read-only access, and all requests can be cached. SQLite [sqlite.org] might be a worth while cross platform back-end for this purpose. So you will only need to write an app that copies the data out of the access database into the sql lite db.

[dstiles]

Thanks for the input.

Interesting about 32bit - not yet sure but I'll look into that.

Long term I wish I'd never been persuaded to use ASP in the first palce! :(

I have several web sites with a common "library" of code shared between them so reworking to another language is a very long-term solution. I recently spent some time trying to find and run a couple of asp to php converters in an attempt to move to linux: total rubbish; I may just as well rewrite from scratch. :(

The mdb's can be written to by the web apps - at least, some can; although the specific one under discussion is a read-only. On the other hand it can be sorted and extracted from in a variety of ways.

If I'm going to use any database other than Access it will be MySQL - I have experience with it and facilities available under linux and windows, including ASP read/write. It is also used for some of the other web sites. Thanks for the suggestion, though.

[dstiles]

To close off this thread: A few months back I started work on an AWK script to convert from an MDB export to a MySQL import.

Since my desktop is linux (Mint) I use MDBViewer (quicker and easier for this than Access) to export data from each MDB and then run it through the AWK script. There are a few things that do not run well, notably when the first character of a field is a newline, but with built-in error trapping in the AWK script such things are highlighted in the terminal, allowing me to track them down in the exported CSV without much trouble.

The web sites' ASP coding always had a MySQL option as well as an MDB one so there are few changes to make in the ASP scripts: a very simple change in a common (site-specific) database definition ASP script; a conversion in (usually) a single processing script to convert from CRLF to LF manipulation (eg in split functions); and in a very few cases changing the date format.

I test the finished script on a local dev server (Windows 2000) and then upload it to the live web site (currently still 2003): five minutes there, mostly testing it, and a site is changed.

I'm converting several a week at the moment and am about half way - could be a lot faster but other things to do.

[Ocean10000]

Thanks for the update.