I have an application that uses old.mdb provided by a 3rd party vendor. The old.mdb has 5 tables. Here lies the problem. The 3rd party vendor made few changes to the database (lets call it new.mdb). The new.mdb has 7 tables, which includes two new tables that I don’t need. Besides this, he has also changed the structure of 5 existing tables. The changes are simple changes that include renaming existing fields, adding a few new fields (that I don’t need), dropping few fields (that I can live without). As expected, the application fails to run with new.mdb. The programmer that created the application left the firm 2 years ago and my access skills are moderate. I was hoping for some quick way to copy the data from new.mdb to old.mdb and continue feeding the application with the old.mdb.

Appreciate any help!
DD

Well if this is a third party app, the third party should enable the Migration as well.

Relationships are hard to maintain if there are autonumbers in this database :(, migrating data is going to be hard in that case.

Otherwize just "link" the tables and use an append query to send the data from one to the other.

Offcourse I hope you will be using the new App after migrating... not the old one :) Otherwize there is no sence in migrating said data is there?

Thanks for the quick reply. What I need is to be able to delete all the data from all five tables in old.mdb and then copy the data from respective tables in new.mdb. So do I need to execute any copy based commands or linking the table fields will do the trick. It would also help if you could provide me a little more detail.

Cheers

Link your table using the Link table wizard (in the menu: Tools> Datbase Utils > Linked Table manager)

Then simply use Append and Delete queries as if they tables are your own...

Why migrate from New to Old though? Doesnt make sense IMHO.

I know it might sound a bit strange. The fact is that the application will not work with the new database structure and therefore I need to copy the data from new database into old database and then let the application continue to run on the old database. Ideally, I would have liked the ability to easily copy the data from tables across different databases without having to link the tables. Not sure if that is even possible!

Without SOME kind of link, Impossible...

You can do Append queries in the new DB sending data to the old without "physical" linked tables... But that still requires a virtual link to be there.

The physical links by far are the easiest

just to repeat the point that namliam made

if the tables have autonumbers that are used to link tables together - what may happen is that when you import data from one table to another, new autonumbers will be generated.

If that happens, then the links will no longer worked

ie old number 1150 may become 250 after the import - so records in the linked table will no longer match correctly to the old item 1150 - which may now not exist, or be the wrong record.

So you need to consider this possibility.

I just checked it. There is only one table in old.mdb that has one column of type autonumber. This column has some data which is not referenced in the application anywhere and is not even used to link other tables. This column has been also dropped in the corresponding table in new.mdb.