Microsoft® Office Access 2003 Inside Out

Installing the Microsoft SQL Server Data Engine (MSDE)

If you intend to build Microsoft Access projects (.adp files), which link directly to a database defined in Microsoft SQL Server, you should install the Microsoft SQL Server Data Engine (MSDE) on your desktop machine to facilitate building and testing your application. MSDE is a special version of Microsoft SQL Server 2000 configured to run on either operating system supported by Microsoft Office 2003—Windows 2000 SP3 or Windows XP. With MSDE installed, you can use a Microsoft Access project file to create databases and define tables, views, diagrams, and stored procedures that you can later move to SQL Server on a network. You normally install MSDE on your desktop machine. However, you can ...