Multithreading

A thread is a software process running independently on a multitasking operating system such as Windows 95 or Windows NT Workstation. For example, the ability to use multiple threads allows you to run a communications software program to download a file at the same time as you use your word processor to edit a document. Microsoft Jet 3.5 uses threads internally to enhance performance and provide background services such as:

• Read-ahead caching.
  
  
• Write-behind caching (transaction commit).
  
  
• Cache maintenance.
  
  
• Detecting if changes have been made to a shared database.

By default, Microsoft Jet uses a maximum of three threads. You can increase this number by modifying the value of the Threads setting in the registry. You may want to try increasing the number of threads if there is a large amount of activity in your database, or if it contains a large number of linked tables.

Note It is not possible to use multiple threads to call an instance of Microsoft Jet from Visual C++ or any other programming language. All multithreading support for Microsoft Jet is internal to the engine itself.