On 2012-01-31 9:07 PM, sparks wrote:

As Larry points out, this is by design and trying to work around it in
the manner you are investigating is indeed a recipe for disaster. While
this may be possible in other (dare I say real) DBMSs, it is not
supported by Access.

A few pointers to managing your development and production environments:
Start by splitting your database into a Frontend and a Backend, if you
have not already done so. The backend should *always* remain in .mdb or
..accdb format, or you will not be able to change the design in the
future. The frontend is developed in .mdb (.accdb) format, but is
deployed in the production environment in .mde (.accde) format to
prevent tinkering by the end user. So :

Development : Front End = mdb (accdb), Back End = mdb (accdb)
Production : Front End = mde (accde), Back End = mdb (accdb)

Now, whenever a new Frontend has been developed, the resulting new mde
only needs to be copied to the production environment and relinked to
the production backend.

Changes to the backend are much trickier and there are several possible
approaches. I would recommend that you carefully script such changes in
your development environment and then apply them in all you production
environments. For example, executing the following statement in the
Backend will do exactly what it suggests :

CurrentDb.Execute "ALTER TABLE MyTable ADD COLUMN MyNewColumn TEXT(100)"

Scripting allows all to be applied quickly and accurately, which is
especially important if the same changes have to be applied to multiple
instances of the database. At that point, however, you will still need
"Exclusive" lock on the backend database.


HTH


Jan T