A comparative analysis of the Jet data Engine and MSDE

1 Jet data Engine and MSDE

1.1 Jet data Engine

The Microsoft Jet data Engine is part of a Microsoft Access database system used to retrieve and store data in users and system databases. The Microsoft Jet data Engine, as a data manager, can be used as a basis for creating database systems such as Microsoft Access.

In Access 97, the data engine uses Jet 3.51; in Access 2000, the default data engine uses Jet 4.0.

Compared to previous versions of Jet, JET4.0 has been enhanced in the following ways:

Support for full Unicode;

Low level lock;

Enhanced support for SQL92, compatible with SQL Server;

Jet/sql Server 7 bidirectional replication;

Enhanced replication conflict processing;

Local OLE DB

1.2 MSDE Data Engine

The Microsoft Data Engine (Msde,microsoft) is a client/server data engine that provides local data storage on a smaller computer system, such as on a single-user computer or a small workgroup server, with Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 compatibility.

Unlike SQL Server 7.0, MSDE has a database size of 2G, is not supported by Windows 95 or later for symmetric multi-process (SMP), or as a replication publisher in a replicated database environment (although it can be used as a replication subscriber). MSDE can be run on Windows NT 4.0 and later and Windows 95 and later.

Some key technologies are included in MSDE:

Dynamic lock;

Unicode, a technology that improves support for multiple languages;

transaction log;

Dynamic self-management;

Merge replication;

transactional replication. For a SQL Server Publisher, MSDE can be treated as a subscriber, and publishers can replicate two different types of objects (tables and stored procedures). Changes made by the Publisher can be delivered to the Subscriber site on a regular/irregular basis.