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Warning: Access 2007 may delete instead of compact a database

June 18, 2008, 12:00 AM PDT

Takeaway: You can compact an Access database using the same name — ordinarily. Access 2007 seems to have a serious problem, deleting the database entirely. Fortunately, the fix is in.

When you compact a database and use the same name, Access is supposed to create a new compacted database and delete the original. Access 2007 has a huge bug, though. Instead of the above, Access deletes the old database without creating the new one — nice.

If you try to compact a database, and Access 2007 displays a warning that it can’t delete name.accdb after compacting it and suggests that you remove the read-only status and try again, do not click OK. If you do, Access will most likely destroy your database. I put off writing about this for a while because I couldn’t re-create the compact/delete problem myself.

An April hotfix supposedly fixes the problem, but since I couldn’t re-create the bug, I couldn’t test the hotfix with any certainty. The good news is that I’ve not heard any horror stories about the hotfix. In addition, the word is that it does indeed fix the compact bug.

I’m wondering just how big a problem this bug was — did anyone run into it before the hotfix was available?

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About Susan Harkins

Susan Sales Harkins is an IT consultant, specializing in desktop solutions. Previously, she was editor in chief for The Cobb Group, the world's largest publisher of technical journals.

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RE: Warning: Access 2007 may delete instead of compact a database

elongp 19th Aug 2010

We just upgraded to Office 2007 this spring, and we installed SP2, which is supposed to contain this hotfix. We have a user who is getting this error. Any other ideas why? Perhaps because some users have read only and some have read/write?

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p.s. It's not my setup...

matthew_of_cambridge 15th Jul 2009

I have a fully patched version of Office. I've used various versions of Office over the last ten years - 97, 2000, XP, 2003, now 2007- they ALL have this problem.

I once lost my biggest customer to a similar issue in Access... "Compact and repair" silently totalled the test prototype installed on my customer's LAN (when I ran the C+R on my devel. machine instead of the LAN-based server from which the Access data-store was externally linked), which destroyed their confidence and undermined the deal (even though I'd told them it might fail, the silent failure, which worked fine on my computer but trashed their system, made me look stupid.)
Thanks Microsoft! I can't wait for the European Union to smack your unfair T's and C's into outer space! Has anyone else here tried complaining, or even, helpfully tried reporting a bug to MS' developers? You just can't help them, even if you are registered as a MS partner developer.

This is just what they always say - "Yeah, the program had that issue previously, but we've fixed that now... Just upgrade to the next version and pay us another big wad of cash..." Fixed in the last decade? I don't think so.

Maybe the only solution is to introduce some competition into the market - until then, MS will be pleased to rake in the money and ignore the suffering they impose on cash-strapped startup developers through the lies their marketing department tells.

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NOT HOTFIXED and NOT a new bug!

matthew_of_cambridge 15th Jul 2009

As a pro. Access developer and MS partner, I can say two things:

1. This is NOT a new "feature". The "delete everything, or corrupt some or all of VBA modules or database" feature has been around for a long time, and can be triggered by a wide range of different actions, most often to do with either COMPACT AND REPAIR, or an untrapped exception that crashes Access, or some combination of such things... This feature has been built in to every version of Access that I can remember, at the very least since v. 97, if not 95 or earlier. That's right - It's serious, it's been happening for over a decade, and they've still not fixed it...

2. This problem has NOT been hotfixed. It's the summer of 2009 now, and these types of problems have happened to me several times in the last six months. WAKE UP MICROSOFT!!! What will it take? A class-action lawsuit from the developers who should be their best friends?

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