Cannot open any more databases – Another Access Bug

Software Bug

It’s turning out to be a rough New Year for Microsoft Access as we appear to be hit with another bug which has a number of possible symptoms:

  • Error 3014: “Can’t Open Any More Tables”
  • Error 3048: “Cannot open any more databases”
  • Error 3211: “The database engine could not lock table ‘TableName’ because it is already in use by another person or process” (unconfirmed)
  • Even after closing, the access process, msaccess.exe, remains and the lock file, laccdb, remains as well
  • Error “Already in use by Admin”

I’ve seen reports that the issue relates to build 16.0.14827.20158, but i”m not sure if it is limited to just that one build or not.

Fixed - 2022-02-08
It has been reported that Version 2201, Build 14827.20192, was release late last night or early this morning and fixes the issue. Verifying the build’s release note, it does indeed confirm this is a fix.

So you may wish to try updating your Office/Access installation and the problem should resolve itself.

Threads On The Subject

As they say, misery loves company, so here are a few of the many posting related to this error.

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Microsoft Access Runtime Download Link Not Working?!

Several posts have recently appeared in various forums

MS Office 365 runtime page doesn't work
Is it just me or has MS borked the download page for the 365 runtimes?
Access 365 Runtime
I need the Access 365 Runtime but the link does not work.
Unable to download MS Access 365 Runtime
...
We tried to download the MS Access 365 Runtime on the portal Download and install Microsoft 365 Access Runtime but the button are unclickable.
...

and many more

reporting that the Microsoft 365 Access Runtime download link doesn’t work on the official Microsoft Support page found at:

Download and install Microsoft 365 Access Runtime
Download the Microsoft 365 Access Runtime which allows you to run Microsoft 365 Access applications if you don’t have the desktop version of Microsoft 365 Access and need to use an application built to run with Access 2010 or later.

 

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Determine the Path of a Mapped Drive

Find Path

Today, I thought I’d briefly touch upon Mapped Drives to provide a couple important tools that any developer should have to properly, quickly and easily work with Mapped drives.

Mapped Drives

A mapped drive is just a shortcut to a drive that’s physically located on a different computer. LifeWire

It allows you to designate a local drive letter to an external resource.  For example, you could assign the Z: drive letter to a remote share \\SomeServerName\ShareName (UNC path)_.  This way the user doesn’t need to know the actual path and can simply use the Z: drive from Windows explorer.

The same principle is true when Linking Tables within a database, instead of using the full UNC path, they can simplify their lives, and simply used the Mapped drive instead.  That said, there have been issues in the past with Mapped drives with Access, and it is highly recommend that table links always be established with UNC or IP based path.  This is part of the reason for this article, to show how you can determine the full path from an existing Mapped Drive.

Determine the Path of a Mapped Drive Manually

Let’s look at a few techniques that can be used to manually determine the full path of a Mapped Drive.

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Getting Image Properties (Exif Metadata) Using WIA in VBA

I recently done a series of posts relating to working with image properties (Exif metadata):

Getting Image Properties (Exif Metadata) Using FreeImage
Anyone following this blog knows that I’ve recently released several examples of how one can get a single exif property or all the exif properties of an image using a variety of techniques.   There was one more tool in my toolbox that I had used in the past that I wished to explore and…

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Getting All of an Image's Properties Using The GDI+ API
Continuing on my multipart series on using the GDI+ APIs, after looking at how we can retrieve a single property as discussed in my previous article I thought I’d explore retrieving all of the available properties.
File Properties
How to Retrieve a File's Properties with VBA
I’ve been working on a personal project for a little while now and needed to retrieve various file properties. Now I’m not talking about the straightforward properties you can easily retrieve using the File System Object (Size, Date Created, Type, …). If you only need such information, then look over my article: No, I’m interested…

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and so on.

Well, there’s another means to get this information very easily and that to use the Windows Image Acquisition (WIA) library and read off the properties.

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How to Crop an Image Using WIA in VBA

Crop

I’ve previously published several articles about manipulating images with VBA, things like:

VBA - Resize Image
I was trying to help someone out in the MSDN forum, pictures change height width, with wanting to resize images from within an MS Access database. As you can see from my initial post, there are a multitude of possible approaches: Consume a COM object that does these thing Image Magick Stephen Lebans had an…

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VBA – WIA – Flip an Image
I was helping out in a forum discussion regarding manipulating images, specifically flipping them and published some of my code there, so I thought I’d share it here for everyone else to benefit from. Once again, WIA has everything we need to quickly and easily perform this task! WIA offers developers 2 properties: FlipHorizontal and…

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VBA - WIA - Rotate an Image
I was recently exploring automating WIA because I wanted to help someone out in a forum and wanted to see what else it could. It is actually quite impressive and versatile . Below is a very simple function I put together to rotate an image using late binding WIA. This simple function now empowers us…

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Recently, I had someone ask me:

just wondering if there is a similar code cropping images and replacing the original ones with cropped onesA S Mughal

Short answer, of course!

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Listing All The WMI Class Properties With VBA

In my past WMI articles:

VBA - Determine the Installed OS
When troubleshooting various issues, one of the common thing one does is try to get some information about the PC itself.  Things like: OS MS Office It can be difficult at time to get such information from users depending on their skill level and as such, a while back I had post in a forum…

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VBA - Determine the BIOS Serial Number
As part of the same discussion as with my previous post VBA – Get Processor Id the user also wanted to determine the PC’s BIOS Serial Number. Using the same technique, but switching over to using the Win32_BIOS class we can once again easily gather this information. Below is a function that retrieves the BIOS…

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Getting The Hard Drive Serial Number With VBA
I was trying to help in the following Answers forum thread In which Wahedi is inquirying about retrieving the HDD serial number. I knew I had such code stored away because I had done this on a personal project many years ago.  I also knew I had previously provided code to retrieve the BIOS serial…

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VBA - Computer Uptime
I’ve been dealing with an ongoing issue with Access 2010 where calculated controls do not display values. When you start Microsoft Access 2010 on a computer that has not been restarted for a long time (for example, 24 days). … fields that are bound to expressions on forms may not be recalculated when the computer…

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I’ve always shown you how to retrieve a specific element, specific value. Today, however, I thought I’d share a very simple ‘tool’ that I created to help me see what a class could provide me as information. Yes, there is the documentation, but sometimes, seeing the real-life output from your own device greatly aid in the learning process. Understanding what the difference is between DeviceId, Caption and Name … is much easier to do when you see, for yourself, the concrete values returned by WMI.

As such, I developed a very simple function that will enumerate all the properties of the specified WMI Class, thus allowing you to review the output, and this in turn can help you build your own procedure to retrieve just the right property value.

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Getting The Hard Drive Serial Number With VBA

I was trying to help in the following Answers forum thread

Code to pull computer HDD serial number in access form textbox?
How can pull pc hdd (motherboard) serial number in access form textbox? please give me vba code.

In which Wahedi is inquirying about retrieving the HDD serial number.

I knew I had such code stored away because I had done this on a personal project many years ago.  I also knew I had previously provided code to retrieve the BIOS serial number on this blog which employs the same basic approach.

VBA - Determine the BIOS Serial Number
As part of the same discussion as with my previous post VBA – Get Processor Id the user also wanted to determine the PC’s BIOS Serial Number. Using the same technique, but switching over to using the Win32_BIOS class we can once again easily gather this information. Below is a function that retrieves the BIOS…

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So I went digging and found 2 functions that might be of interest to some of you out there.

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Optimizing Access Database Performance

Here’s a Massive Question to Answer:

How can I make my database faster?

This always makes me think of a quote from Access MVP Alumni John W. Vinson

Database performance optimization can be a bit of a black art.John W. Vinson

Black art indeed!  The simple fact of the matter is there is no one answer that solves the issue for every database and will miraculously speed up your database.  The reality is that there are a multitude of potential aspects that can be perfected, improved upon, tweaked, each contributing to improving the overall performance.  There are db admins that spend their careers only doing optimization.

 

Where To Start

Today, I will cover those aspects that I have found can have the biggest impacts on performance improvements, mainly:

Let us briefly touch upon each.

Please note, that I am purposely omitting proper database design in the present discussion.  For me, proper database design is the most critical aspect of database performance, no doubt, but it is way out of the scope of any optimization article and is a subject onto itself.
 
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SQL Statements, To Square Bracket Or Not?

So what exactly is the story with square brackets in SQL Statements?

What’s the difference between

SELECT [FirstName] FROM [Contacts]

and

SELECT FirstName FROM Contacts

?

Today, I’m going to explore this for a moment.

What are Square Brackets Use For In SQL?

First off, when we mention ‘Square Brackets’ we are talking about [ and ].
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Outlook Safe Senders, Not So Safe?!

<rant>

Like many of you, Microsoft has been a blessing and the absolute worst thing I have ever experienced in the computing world.

For a while now, I’ve been banging my head against Outlook because a lot of valid e-mails have been going into my Junk E-mail folder.  So I’ve been missing replies, customer inquiries, …  Where I used to be able to look over my Junk E-mail folder every month, maybe longer, I now need to check it every time I use Outlook, making Junk mail useless since I now have to go through all the e-mail one way or another.

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