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Ohio Audit Reveals More Diebold Problems
armb writes with a link to a Wired Blog entry about irregularities found in Diebold databases from the state of Ohio. The election in question here is November 2006, and the corruption of the entries may raise doubts about accurate tabulations. "Vote totals in two separate databases that should have been identical had different totals. Although Diebold explained that this was part of the system design for separate vote tables to get updated at different times during the tabulation process, the team questioned the wisdom of a design that creates non-identical vote totals. Tables in the database contained elements that were missing date and time stamps that would indicate when information was entered. Entries that did have date/time stamps showed a January 1, 1970 date. The database is built from Microsoft's Jet database engine. The engine, according to Microsoft, is vulnerable to corruption when a lot of concurrent activity is happening with the database, such as what occurs on an election night when results are uploaded and various servers are interacting with the database simultaneously."
Exchange still uses the Jet engine. Its limit is 1,900 concurrent connections.
Not quite. Exchange uses Jet Blue, as do AD and other things embedded in Windows (DHCP server, WINS, etc.). It was strictly for MS-only internal use until Windows 2000, when it was renamed Extensible Storage Engine and the API was made available.
Diebold is using Jet Red. Jet Red is what MS Access uses, as well as the "Microsoft Jet DB Engine" ODBC source that many crappy third-party VB apps use.
Despite sharing the same name (though Jet Blue was renamed, Exchange still refers to it as simply "Jet" in a few places), there's almost nothing in common between the two. Blue/ESE is a lot more fault-tolerant than Red, but concurrent access must be provided by a server application running on top of it -- multiple apps can't open the database file directly at once. That's probably a good thing, since Red/MS Access's cooperative concurrency scheme is what's responsible for most of the corruption issues people have with it.
Jet Blue/ESE is nowhere near the design of say, Oracle or PostgreSQL, or even MSSQL for that matter. It's about on the level of version 3 or 4 of MySQL (using MyISAM, not InnoDB), or perhaps SQLite.
Jet Red/MS Access is just plain garbage and should never be used. Shame on you, Diebold. Shame!