The Entourage User's WebLog

"What's the 'Database Daemon'?" do I hear you ask?

Hardly surprising if you did, because users don't normally come across it. In fact, they're not meant to! A Daemon is a little application without a user interface that carries out some important maintenance task unseen to the user. Here's Wikipedia's definition.

The Database Daemon is a little utility that handles all the interaction with the Microsoft Office Database. It is the Daemon that writes mail into the database, extracts information from it for display etc. Every time you tell Entourage (or one of the other Office applications) to do something with the data, it asks the Daemon to do it. The Daemon was introduced in Entourage vX as a major enhancement to the stability and security of the database. Because it's a 'one trick pony', it is far easier to make it bug free than an application like Entourage, which has a thousand other functions. This gives the developers much more chance of writing the data to the database, or reading from it, without introducing any errors through bugs in their code.

The Daemon also keeps running after other office applications have been quit (if you have Notifications turned on in the Entourage preferences) so that you can get alerts from calendar events.

So, why do you need to worry about the Daemon? - Simple answer is that you don't. Need to worry, that is. However, there are circumstances where you may want to stop the Daemon. For example, you, being a good computer user, want to back up your Office Database. Now you may think it's a simple matter of copying the database to a CD, DVD or network location. However, what if the database is modified while you are in the middle of copying it? This is a definite possibility if the Daemon is still running. Also, all programmes write to disk by storing the data in a 'file buffer' - a portion of memory dedicated to this task - then when the buffer is full the data is written out in a stream of known size. It is possible that some changes (or even parts of some changes) may still be queued up in the file buffer within the Daemon and not written to the Database file on the disk. So, it is entirely possible that the copy of the database you have just taken for a back up could be corrupted! The simple solution is to quit the daemon first. This will cause the daemon to write all of it's data to disk first, and you also know that the daemon will not be modifying the database as you take your copy.

That's the theory, now how do you do it? There are several methods:

First, it's important that no other Office applications are running when you quit the daemon. They will crash otherwise.

• Open the application "Activity Monitor" (it lives in the /Applications/Utilities folder). If no window opens then choose 'Activity Monitor' from the Window menu.
  Type 'Daemon' (without the quotes) into the filter box, and select the Database Daemon in the short list of processes that will be left.
  Click the 'Quit' button in the toolbar.
  Click 'Quit Application' in the confirmation dialog that pops up
• Open Entourage and under the 'Entourage' menu select 'Turn Off Notifications'
  Quit Entourage and the daemon will quit as well (assuming you obeyed the instruction to previously quit all office apps).
• Run this Applescript:
  tell application "Microsoft Database Daemon" to quit

That's it

More tomorrow...