I, for one, welcome your new monkey overlords

[andrewducker]

Americans - did you know that monkeys can hack your voting machines?

They Can.

(scarily literal post)

Comments

[odheirre.livejournal.com]

I think this comment is especially interesting:

The Diebold central tabulators use a program called "GEMS" that saves vote totals in Microsoft Access, a Windows-based database program.

Microsoft F*cking Access? Was this someone's high school project or something?

[andrewducker]

Access works perfectly well for systems where (a) the data is held locally and (b) only a few people are using the system at a time. As these systems are going to have locally held data with only one person at a time entering a tiny amount of data, I don't see there being a problem.

[odheirre.livejournal.com]

There's an article here that talks about pros and cons. According to the article, MSDE has more power with transactions and backup/restore operations.

The problems I've had with Access are reliability and security - it seemed frightfully easy for the database to get corrupted, and the security model around Access was questionable at best. Then again, I was using Access 2000, so the new version may have been more robust.

I guess I don't see the advantages of using Access over MSDE, except maybe if you're limited in disk space or memory.

[andrewducker]

I think the main advantage of Access over MSDE is that you can back it up with a simple 'copy' command. Don't you need backup tools to backup MSDE?

Other than that, yes, MSDE would seem to be a better solution, if slightly harder to administer (you can't just drag/drop a file onto the machine - it has to be set up).

[odheirre.livejournal.com]

MSDE has a built-in backup script that you can execute via a Job Scheduler, stored procedure, or command-line prompt. It has the same tools as MS SQL Server - you just have to access it via T-SQL as opposed to a graphic UI. Here's a link.

And, if you try backing it up when you're connected to it, it works just like any other SQL database does. I've had problems running a copy command on Access when attached to it, because that .ldb file keeps information on locking and that sort of thing.