Product Review of Total Visual Agent

Microsoft Online Certified Professional Magazine
Mike Gunderloy, January 9, 2002

Here's another one for the database developers in the group. Many of us have developed solutions that use Microsoft Jet databases for storage, with a variety of front ends -- Access, VC++, or Visual Basic. But how many of us worry about what happens after the solution is deployed? If you just wait for the customer to phone you with a problem, you might consider installing Total Visual Agent instead to give you a proactive approach to Jet database management.

Total Visual Agent provides you with a scheduling engine and a set of tools that understand all versions of Jet, from Access 1.0 right forward to Access 2002. You can schedule actions for execution hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or even multiple times per hour. What can you schedule? Compact and repair cycles, of course, but there's much more. How about rotating archives (similar to the backup plans constructed by SQL Server's Maintenance plan wizard)? Or how about just archiving off the data from critical tables? You can also collect database statistics, run operating system commands on the database file, or run macros within an Access database.

Jet is pretty well ubiquitous for those of us who use Microsoft operating systems, but it's often viewed as a toy database. By using Total Visual Agent, you can add professional data-integrity features to your Jet-based applications. The peace of mind and the safety of critical backups make it worth spending the money.

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