The clients make the connection using MDAC on their PC. Or if they are going
through a web server, the connection is made through MDAC on the web
server.
They don't necessarily need to be the same versions but it can help with
troubleshooting if you have a standard for everyone. The client (PC or Web
Server)
needs to be at MDAC 2.6 to access named instances. There were many issues
resolved with MDAC 2.6 SP 2 so you'd likely want clients to be at least at
this version or higher.

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Is it necessary or beneficial for the SQL Server and clients to be running
the same version of MDAC? Our environment is IIS5 clients on Windows 2000
SP3 and SQL Server 2000 SP3.

The client makes a connection to SQL Server using MDAC. The client does not
connect to MDAC on the server machine, correct?

Any info would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Pete Conlan

Another point to is that if is beneficial to have the client machines at
the same or higher version of MDAC than the SQL Server installation
installs. This way the client's MDAC has access to all the features that
are available in SQL Server.

However, in some cases if the client has a higher version and modifies DTS
packages then those packages may not run as scheduled jobs on the server.

Rand
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