I’ve been doing a fair bit of data reconciliation testing recently. One of the things I’m (reluctantly) using is Microsoft Access. There are many reasons to hate Access, here’s the latest one: sometimes, for no good reason, Access will have a total crash when you try to save a query. I bumped into this problem a few days ago. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. I checked everything twice over – still nothing. Eventually I turned to Google, and after a few seconds found this: http://support.microsoft.com/?id=319491.

I opened it up, had a look at the “Symptoms” section where it says this: “When you try to save a modified query or run a query, Microsoft Access may quit unexpectedly without an error message.“. Yeah, that sounds about right. And it doesn’t sound like they feel particularly ashamed about it either.

The fix is to turn off the “auto tracking” function. The Auto Tracking function is really quite cool. If you change the name of a query, any other query that references it will be automatically updated with the new name. There aren’t too many nice things about Access, so it’s a real shame that it only works if you turn off those nice features off.

So. If you run into this problem, swap to a difference RDBMS. If you can’t, do the following:

1. On the Tools menu, click Options.
2. In the Options dialog box, click the General tab.
3. Under Name AutoCorrect, click to clear the following check boxes:
   • Track name AutoCorrect into
   • Perform name AutoCorrect
   • Log name AutoCorrect changes
4. Click OK.