That is not to say, that Daisy will be unaffected.

Note that at the time of writing, January 18th, 2001, no reports of any problems have been received.

Daisy does not Change Data

Remember that Daisy has been written as a passive program and does not change any data in the database being analysed.

Daisy Versions

This note is written with respect to Daisy 4.0 and later versions.

Older versions of Daisy, which were written in Visual Basic 3.0 will still work, but as many are running under Windows 3.1 and earlier versions of Windows NT, there may well be other problems associated with the operating system, which will be specific to the company.

These versions will work correctly under the following circumstances :-

1. No analysis of Date fields involving the Year, Previous Monday, Previous Sunday or Day of Week, are performed.

2. All Date fields will be analysed correctly, if the year is entered as 4 digits.

3. The Medium Date mapping is not used, when working under Windows '95.

However, it is recommended that the version of Daisy is upgraded to the current one, to overcome any unknown problems caused by the interaction of Daisy and older operating systems.

Daisy and Microsoft Windows '95 and Windows NT

All current versions (Daisy 4.10 or later) run on these two operating systems.

How Windows handles dates depends on which version of the routine oleaut32.dll has been installed on the computer.

Earlier versions (2.1 or earlier) of this routine, assume that a two-digit year is always 19xx, whilst later versions (2.2 or later) assume that two-digit years run from 1930 to 2029. There is a Microsoft Knowledge Base article on the subject (Article ID: Q155669).

All current versions or Daisy and Windows are delivered with the later oleaut32.dll.

Daisy 4.10/4.11/4.50 and Visual Basic 4.0

Daisy is written in Microsoft Visual Basic 4.0, as it cannot be converted to the later VB 5.0, due to a bug in that program.

This means that Daisy handles two-digit years as defined by the version of oleaut32.dll. In addition any database accessed directly using the Microsoft Jet Engine or through ODBC will follow the rules laid down by those programs.

There is one exception in that dates entered as yymmdd are always assumed to be 19xx, so that if you use this form of date, then always use the full form of yyyymmdd to avoid any confusion.

All routines in Daisy that act on dates have been checked according to the rules laid down by Microsoft.

A Warning

It cannot be stressed how important it is to have the computer and operating systems Year 2000 Compliant, as Daisy depends heavily on its working environment.

Also, be safe rather than sorry and enter all dates with a four-digit year, as this will work with all programs and operating systems.

Daisy and Non-Compliant Databases

One of the subsidiary uses of Daisy is the analysis of databases, that are perhaps a mixture of two- and four-digit years, that have been created either by accident or bad design.

For this reason Daisy 2000 contains some special mapping formats to analyse databases for Year 2000 date problems.