Question : Does ODBC connection from INFORMIX DB to MS ACCESS has committed read on the data?

Hello Experts,

I have created an ODBC Connection between Informix Database and MS Access, and I am accessing those tables data using MS Access. Does this lock the tables, and if there are any updates to be made on those table, will those update jobs fail while I am using the data.

I have got few colleagues who say that, MS Access has a commited Read, and I need to set the flag to no, so that if there were any underlying process updates on these tables, the process would not break.

Can you please let me know if this really happens. I was under the assumption that If I am making an ODBC connection, then I am only reading it as an interface and all the other processes would scuccessfully run.

Any kind of help is greatly appreciated

Answer : Does ODBC connection from INFORMIX DB to MS ACCESS has committed read on the data?

Hi,

I don't know Informix but in case of other databases I can say that an ODBC connection usually doesn't lock the tables. But of course it depends on the way you are using the tables. If you only open them for reading then it doesn't disturb any write operations. If you write a record with Access usually the current changed record is locked - but only as long as it is written ("optimistic lock").
If this would not be the case then few users would be enough to dead lock each other working with the same data. Of course you can lock any database with opening the records or tables in the wrong mode but usually Access handles it as optimistic as possible so normally there should be no problem.

Simply test it, create a test database and access it with Access with more than one client.

Cheers,

Christian