I might be pushing my luck lately, but in recent days I've had more than a few excellent solutions to my various queries so I have no doubt that someone will have some ideas on this one.

I have an application which is going to be release shortly. Up till now I've been using the VS package and deployment wizard which is very good. I am thinking however about subsequent releases and of course the ever present bug fixes.

I would like to use something to create a self installing update. Most likely, the update will simply overwrite the exe, but in some cases there may be a dll or ocx that is to be updated as well. All this can still be achieved with the files created by the wizard, but now comes the tricky part (for me anyhow) and that is the database updates.

I use an Access database since the ADO makes life easy for me, and since Access provides a good "poor man's" SQL DB. Occassionally, I might have to add a stored procedure or view (oops I mean macro or query) or even update the structure of a table!. I can do all of this through code but I would prefer it if the code was not part of my application. I would like the "updater" package to do the updates for me.

There are other ways of doing this too as I'm sure you'll see. My preference is for very little user fiddling if at all possible.

So, to the questions:
Are there good alternatives to the package and deployment wizard?
Are there any updater package wizards around?
How do other programmers go about deploying DB updates to a large number of installs? (Note that all my previous experience is on large scale database applications usually involviing Oracle and usually requiring my trusty DBA to do the work. Also, this is the first time I'm doing an app in VB as opposed to Java or LISP (hehe)

Any answers or suggestions are welcome.

Regards

Paul Lewis