[RESOLVED] Do DB Connection Providers Ace & Jet Libraries come with windows or .Net fw

[GBeats]

Hi,

I couldnt find anywhere whether or not the Ace and Jet Providers Libraries come with windows or not.

im using both of them in a program and need to know if any windows pc could use it, or any pc with office installed would be ok.

does anyone know off hand thanks.

im refering to this provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0 file thats included in the connection string
and the 'Ace' provider

[jmcilhinney]

The Jet OLE DB provider is installed by default in recent versions of Windows (XP and later but not sure before that) but ACE is not installed on any version by default. ACE gets installed with Office or a free standalone installer can be downloaded from Microsoft.

There's no point using both Jet and ACE in the one application. ACE can do everything Jet can plus more. If you're using ACE at all then ACE is required so you may as well use ACE for everything. If you don't need ACE, i.e. you're using file formats from Office 2003 and earlier only (MDB, XLS, etc) and not file formats from Office 2007 and later (ACCDB, XLSX, etc) then you may as well just use Jet so there's no need to worry about whether it's installed or not.

Note that Jet comes in 32-bit for only, so any applications that use Jet must be built for the x86 platform to work correctly on 64-bit Windows. The first version of ACE (Office 2007 [12.0]) also only came in 32-bit form. The last two versions of ACE (Office 2010 [14.0], Office 2013 [15.0]) are available in both 32-bit and 64-bit form. That's not as great as it sounds though, because you can only have one form installed on each machine. For compatibility with older add-ins, etc, Microsoft recommends installing 32-bit Office unless you specifically need the few extra features the 64-bit edition provides. That means that almost everyone will have 32-bit ACE installed, so you should still build your apps for the x86 platform.

For those users without Office, you could install the standalone 64-bit ACE but you would then break compatibility with future apps they might install that required 32-bit ACE. That still means that you are excluding that small portion of users who have 64-bit Office installed. As such, I recommend building your project twice: once for x86 and once for x64. That will cover everyone. Only those users who have already installed 64-bit Office or ACE should opt for the x64 edition of your app.

[GBeats]

Hi,

your like an encyclopedia of programming

i was wandering whether i needed them both, its just for a simple file merge app and i dont htink it will be used on more than 1 pc, its going to read xls/xsls and csv files.
i did notice the ace seems a little faster but that may just be me.

so you think i should just stick with ACE?, the destination pc already has office.

thanks

[jmcilhinney]

If you want to work with XLSX files then you need ACE so yes, I'd suggest using just ACE and no Jet. If the user has Access installed then you're definitely good to go. I'm actually not sure whether ACE is installed with Office if Access is not installed. I'd guess it is but I've never tested that or seen it mentioned elsewhere.

[GBeats]

i just tested processing 30+ files (xlsx and csv)with a total of 20800 records

reading through ACE and writing datatable rows through the excel server/program and it took 3 minutes, before with jet reading the csv it took 7 minutes.....

i rearranged the code a bit though and put the files into a list of a class i built and automatically set all the queries and connection strings before the procesing, before i did that during processing, its so much cleaner with the class objects.