Microsoft Access lives after all!!

As part of my job, I need to access our company's mainframe computer data and prepare reports and data extract analysis from time to time. To do that I can generally rely on our contract programmer and our in-house talent. But I've wanted for some time to access the data directly thinking it might be a little faster. The problem has been that ever Microsoft Access was installed on my computer 3 years ago, the program has run slower than molasses. It would run local database queries almost instantaneously but then I don't have any local databases the size of our mainframe databases.

Our IT department has looked at everything on my computer and has reinstalled Access as well as checked and rechecked the OBDC connection to the mainframe as well as my network connection. They had searched every Microsoft knowledge base to see what might be slowing things down. It was getting to the point where we even considered giving me a completely different computer just for this one small facet of my job. I didn't do much Access programming because queries that were taking 15 to 20 seconds on others' computers were taking 5, 10, 20 minutes on mine. And the noise my computer made during these queries was surprising considering all the data was on the mainframe.

Finally, two days ago I Googled the web once again and came up with the wonderful site W6 An NPR Mind in an MTV World. There was the headline "Suddenly ODBC Is Very Slow". As I read the article, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Maybe this was the answer!

The amazing thing was that not only did this blog describe my problem, it listed the solution in terms that I could understand and follow. Within seconds, my slow Microsoft Access was cured. I could once again join the real world of Access users.

Not to bore you with the details (too late, you say) my OBDC connection had been set to Tracing Mode On so that every reference to a database, every comparison, every retrieval, was logged. That's why my hard drive was working so hard and that's why everything went so slow. It was as simple as going to Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Data Sources, Tracing, Stop Tracing Now. Three years of frustration eliminated in 10 seconds. A little bit of knowledge goes a long way.