Access Database Design & Programming, 3rd Edition

Appendix D. Obtaining or Creating the Sample Database

The sample flat file “database,” as well as the Access database and the sample programs, are all available for free download from the O’Reilly Internet site. You can choose from any of the following methods to download the data that accompanies the book:

Via the World Wide Web

The sample files are available from ftp://ftp.ora.com/published/oreilly/windows/access.design2/CodeAccess3.zip.

Via an ftp client program

You can use an ftp client such as WS_FTP32 to ftp to ftp.ora.com, change to the directory published/oreilly/windows/access.design3/, and get the file example.zip.

In each case, the sample files are stored in a single file compressed using the PKZip file format. If you don’t own a utility program capable of decompressing the software (or if you’re still doing these things from the command line), I highly recommend that you download an evaluation copy of the shareware utility WinZip, from Nico Mak Computing, Inc.; it is available at http://www.winzip.com.

EXAMPLE.ZIP contains LIBRARY_FLAT.DOC (the flat database created with Microsoft Word), as well as LIBRARY95.MDB (the sample Access database for Access for Office 95), and LIBRARY97.MBD (the sample Access database for Access for Office 97). (The two versions perform optimally when using different file formats.) The .mbd file itself contains the following:

• The four tables (BOOKS, AUTHORS, PUBLISHERS, and BOOK/AUTHOR) and their primary indexes

• A code module, Examples, that contains ...