Hi Joel and all,

You are correct that we have been saying that shipping anything in MDAC is EXTREMELY expensive. Reason is that when you ship something in MDAC what you're really doing is shipping something with Windows. Shipping just 1 file in Windows requirese so much effort because of their schedule, platform support, Service-pack, and QFE policy that we believe that the cost of it is just too much to deal with it for the value that customers get. We would have to deflect resources just for shipping anything in MDAC since MDAC and Windows is such a big train. We learned big time with the ODBC driver and MDAC of the costs of having it there. We want to be much more quick at providing features and SPs to customers. MDAC and Windows doesn't help us.

Another side of this is that it would be more difficult for you also to provide fixes for your customers. You can imagine that if we were shipping anything in Windows and need to issue a Service Pack for the provider, you would have to install it from Windows and have all your customers install it from them.

Thanks to all for the feedback on this thread.

- Ricardo

>The only thing accomplished by not distributing the OLE-DB Provider with MDAC was to tick off the very community that is allegedly supported. As for encouraging upgrades, whether the OLE-DB provider was/was not included, I don't think the upgrade/purchase numbers would be materially affected.
>

I remember hearing somewhere (DevCon Webcast?) that being part of a system component such as MDAC was "very expensive", whatever that means. I think even the VFP ODBC driver was dropped from the package with MDAC 2.6, but of course is still freely available.
Joel Leach
Microsoft Certified Professional