Beginning Access™ 2007 VBA

10.5. Migrating an Existing Access Database to an Access Project

Microsoft Access has an Upsizing Wizard to help you migrate existing Access databases to SQL Server. In this section, I cover some tips for making the migration smoother. You will then upsize the Northwind sample database that comes with Microsoft Access so you can see how the process works.

10.5.1. Changes to an Existing Database

Before migrating your existing Access application to an Access Project that uses SQL Server, here are some tips that will make the migration go more smoothly:

• Consider removing any spaces in your table names and, of course, if you change the name, also change all the places that reference the table name. If you do not remove them, you will later have to use brackets to refer to SQL Server tables with spaces in their names (for example, [Table Name]).

• Make sure that each table has a unique index. If you have established primary keys, that should be sufficient.

• Make a backup copy of the ACCDB file in case things go wrong.

• Check the dates in your Access tables. Most problems with upsizing occur with date conversions. For example, Access and SQL Server have different date ranges that are acceptable. SQL Server covers only the period from Jan 1, 1753 to Dec 31, 9999. Access allows dates in the range from Jan 1, 100 to Dec 31, 9999.

With these tips in mind, let's walk through using the Upsizing Wizard to see how this works.

10.5.2. Using the Upsizing Wizard

As previously mentioned, you can use ...