Performance issues regarding Access 2003 and the OLE Object data type

Question

In MS Access 2003 (I know, I know), I'm using the OLE Object data type to persist the sate of some objects that are marked as serializable (just using a IO.BinaryFormatter to serialize to a MemoryStream, and then saving that to the db as a Byte array). Does this work pretty much like a varbinary, or a blob? Are there any gotchas looming in the shadows that anyone knows about? Any performance advise or war stories? I'd profit from any advice.

Answer 1

In access I never figured out how to properly use the OLE object data type without real performance problems (and structural too -- lots of compact and repair jobs). The solution path I've always taken (mind you I haven't used Access in anger now for years) is to just store the blogs onto disk somewhere and store the file location in the data table.

Answer 2

I can't answer your specific question, but you might want to look at the GetChunk and AppendChunk methods in Access help, since those are the methods used for writing and manipulating data in binary fields.

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David W. Fenton
David Fenton Associates