Microsoft Access Driver Query is corrupt

Posted in : Applications, Microsoft, Office 365, Windows, Windows Server By Hanessa Milaszewski Translate with Google ⟶

4 years ago

INTRODUCTION
Today I was involved in a particular incident where Windows Updates did its thing and broke something. This time it involved an update for Access, a database program provided by Microsoft, causing specific queries to output that they are corrupt.
Due to its unclear nature at first, I thought I would write a quick blog post and hopefully spare other system administrators from at least some amount of head scratching.

SCENARIO
One of our customers use a certain timesheet software, published as an IIS web site where users can log onto and record their time. The web site acts as an extended module for the customer’s Project Management software, where Microsoft Access Database Engine drivers are used to facilitate the data in between these through queries.
INVESTIGATION
While attempting to logon to this IIS web site, the users were met with an error message explaining that the query utilizing Microsoft Access Driver was corrupt.

Coming from a system administrator that has not dabbled too much with databases, it would be natural to imagine that it is in fact the Access Driver which is corrupted and might require some sort of reinstallation. This idea was quickly dropped however when I spoke to the customer again and they mentioned that this issue was first discovered on a specific day of the week. Namely, the day of the week after Windows Updates are scheduled to run automatically within the server environment.
This immensely helpful information led me straight to a newly installed security update which, of course, matched up with the very same timeframe as chronicled by the customer.

SOLUTION
By doing a quick search of the aforementioned security update, KB4484127, Microsoft describes an identified issue where certain Update queries utilizing Access could generate error messages mentioning “corrupt”. Being astounded over how eerily similar this known issue was compared to the problem I was investigating, I did not hesitate and tried uninstalling KB4484127. Indeed, the IIS web site turned out to be fully functional again with this update removed.
At the time of writing, Microsoft has declared that the known issue with specific Update queries outputting “corrupt” is affecting all supported builds of Access. A fixed update for Access 2016 is available for download, however the fix for the remaining Access versions are estimated to be released on November 22nd 2019 and onwards.

If you have any questions or opinions regarding this matter, feel free to email me at hanessa.milaszewski@xenit.se