Microsoft® Access® 2010 In Depth

33. Upgrading Access 2003 and Earlier Applications to Access 2010

Access 2010 .accdb format marks an abrupt departure from the Jet juggernaut that Access 1.0 spawned by the introduction of the .mdb database file in November 1992. Each version of Jet-based Access—1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 95, 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003—had a different database file structure at the binary (byte) level. The differences between 16-bit .mdb files created with versions 1.0 and 1.1 were relatively minor; thus, you could use the Compact feature of Access to convert version 1.0 .mdb files to version 1.1, or vice versa. The file formats of later versions of Jet databases are sufficiently different to require, with the exception of the Access 2000 and 2002 formats, one-way conversion ...