Using Microsoft Jet with IIS

When you need unlimited users, 24x7 support, and ACID transactions, Microsoft strongly recommends that you use Microsoft SQL Server with Internet Information Server (IIS). Although Active Server Pages (ASP) works with any OLE DB and ODBC-compliant database, IIS has been extensively tested and is designed to work with Microsoft SQL Server with high transaction traffic and unlimited users that can occur in an Internet scenario.

Note "ACID" is an acronym for the four properties of transaction-processing systems: Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability.

ASP also supports using the Microsoft Jet database engine as a valid data source. The Access ODBC Driver and Microsoft OLE DB Provider for Microsoft Jet are not intended to be used with high-stress, high-concurrency, 24x7 server applications, such as web, commerce, transactional, messaging servers, and so on.

When you run Microsoft Jet in an IIS environment, it is recommended that you use the native Jet OLE DB Provider in place of the Microsoft Access ODBC driver. The Microsoft Access ODBC driver (Jet ODBC driver) can have stability issues due to the version of Visual Basic for Applications that is invoked because the version is not thread safe. As a result, when multiple concurrent users make requests of a Microsoft Access database, unpredictable results may occur. The native Jet OLE DB Provider includes fixes and enhancements for stability, performance, and thread pooling (including calling a thread-safe version of Visual Basic for Applications).

Both the ODBC driver and OLE DB Provider provide a wrapper around the Microsoft Jet database engine, which provides the core functionality of both the Access ODBC driver and Jet OLE DB Provider. While Microsoft Jet is consciously (and continually) updated with many quality, functional, and performance improvements, it was not intended (or architected) for the high-stress performance required by 24x7 scenarios, ACID transactions, or unlimited users, that is, scenarios where there has to be absolute data integrity or very high concurrency. Microsoft has performed very robust Multi-User/Stress scenarios that are designed to verify functionality in the appropriate usage space of Microsoft Jet, and addresses any issues that may be revealed.

You can obtain the latest OLE DB provider for Microsoft Jet from the following sources:

• 239114 How to obtain the latest service pack for the Microsoft Jet 4.0 Database Engine
• The latest version of the Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC) and the MDAC Software Devolpers Kit (SDK) is available at the following Microsoft Web site:
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/aa937729.aspx

The OLE DB provider for Microsoft Jet is included in the following products:

• Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 Enterprise
• Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0 Enterprise
• Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 Enterprise

You should avoid using Access databases on Web servers if it is possible. For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

For more information about using the Microsoft Jet Database Engine and the native Jet OLE DB Provider, click the following article numbers to view the articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: For more information about Microsoft Jet and the native Jet OLE DB Provider, see the following documentation:

• "The Microsoft Jet Database Engine Programmer's guide (2nd Edition)" offers extensive discussion about tuning, usage, and limitations of the Microsoft Jet Database Engine.
• The file, Joltread.txt, that is included with the products listed in the "More Information" section.