Tuesday, July 6, 2010

How to repair Access database after index corruption

Microsoft Access 2007 lets you create indexes in a table which can be used to find and sort records faster. An index stores the location of records based on the fields that you choose to index. After obtaining the location from the index, Access can retrieve the data by going directly to the correct location. Thus, indexing can be really faster than scanning through all of the records to find data. At times when these index definitions in a table get corrupt, they would lose their functionality. In order to overcome such issues, you can look for a backup copy of the database file. And, for efficient and instant results you must download a professional Access repair application.

Consider a scenario, wherein, you are trying to import data from a table in employee's database (source) to your organization's master database (destination), and instead receive the following error:

'Operation failed - too many indexes - reduce the number and try again.'

As a result, the import won't take place successfully. Before considering any Access database repair steps, it is necessary for you to understand the possible causes.

Cause
You can witness the above error in the following situations:
  • The destination table's index definitions are corrupt. To elaborate, the MS Access first imports the table definition and data, and then tries to apply the indexes. If the indexes are corrupt, you will encounter the above error message
  • The table in which you are importing data is corrupt
Resolution
You can observe the following workarounds in order to overcome the issue:
  • Create a copy of the destination table, but without any data
  • Remove all indexes, run an append query and move the data from the corrupt table to the new table
  • Recreate the indexes
  • Move the table to a new file and carry on with the import
  • If you do not succeed in eliminating the error message, you must download an Access repair
utility to repair the master database of your organization.
Such tools, being read-only, are considered as the safe way to repair and recover significant Access databases.

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