Multivalue data (which includes attachments) is a feature in Access 2007 that allows several data values to be held in a single data record. SQL Server does not support this data type and to migrate the data a new table is required to hold the multiple values.

Below we see an example of a multivalue attachment.

This data is held in the table shown below.

Unique conversion strategy

MUST will automatically generate new tables, and populate all the multivalue data into SQL Server.

With attachment data, MUST has an option to allow for the individual files to be extracted into directories for each multivalue attachment. The product also includes a utility which if required can upload the extracted files into SQL Server, using SQL Server IMAGE data types which are equivalent to the OLE data types in Access (varbinary(max) can also be used if desired).

Below we see an example of the files which have been extracted to new directories.

Below we can see the converted tables containing all the existing data which has been uploaded back into SQL Server.

Because MUST extracts the documents and also records and populates the filename, it is possible to use this to link back to the documents as an alternative to moving the documents into the SQL Server database.