The Jet database engine first appeared in 1992 as a component of Microsoft Access 1.0. Version 1.0 of Microsoft Jet was a relational database engine providing not only standard database management system (DBMS) functionality such as data definition, data manipulation, querying, security, and maintenance, but also technology that had not yet been seen in desktop databases. These features included updatable views, query-on-query capabilities, and seamless access to heterogeneous data. The engine provided a few methods for accessing table and query structures, but didn’t have a cohesive model for programmatic control over object structures and data manipulation.
In May 1993, Microsoft released Microsoft Jet version 1.1 for Microsoft Access version 1.1 and Microsoft Visual Basic version 3.0. Microsoft Jet 1.1 provided greater connectivity between Microsoft Jet and ODBC databases. It included a new Oracle ODBC driver, introduced a connection manager to provide services for sharing and caching connections, and included general improvements in the ability to work with any ODBC driver. This version also saw the addition of the MSysConf table so that database administrators could prevent the saving of password and user ID information in an attached ODBC table. Additionally, the maximum size of a database file was increased from 128 MB to approximately 1.1 GB. Microsoft also added support for linking (attaching) to Microsoft FoxPro tables, and added some new collating sequences for international users. Microsoft Jet 1.1 also included version 1.1 of the DAO interface, adding the data definition language (DDL) capabilities that were missing from DAO version 1.0.