There's little that can replace access in one interface/app. Have hopes for airtable. :)
Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die
51–60 of 365 posts
Re: Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die
#52Is there a modern and/or open alternative to this? E.g a SQLite + electron or local web client thing where you could build a simple inventory or similar but you should also be able to scale it to client server when the need occurs 10 years down. Note that any number of cloud startups don’t count as an alternative to access. When these things start it’s as an excel sheet with data that no one will go through the enter…
I think that Open/Libre-Office have options for this. You can also use Access as a front end for another db (odbc) backend pretty easily. I'd probably do a web app myself, but that's just me. I know a lot of people that cut their programming teeth on Access apps, including distributed ones.
LibreOffice has Base which can use either embedded database system or talk to proper RDBMS like postgresql. KDE has Kexi which afaik is pretty similar. I have no experience with either, nor have I ever heard anyone to use them.
Re: Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die
#53As the author points out, Access fills an interesting niche where Excel isn't quite enough, but a SQL database and all the stuff that goes along with it is way too much. On top of that, it's completely local so you don't have to pay for licenses or worry about data policies. That niche is big enough to sustain Access pretty much indefinitely. I think the lesson here is that business users more often than not want som…
Another key niche for Access was that MDB was for too long a time (decades) the only single-file DB format that people could reliably ship around as files / store on network shares / etc. Many a VB6 app used MDB as the underlying storage internals of their file format because it was convenient.
SQLite has only relatively recently started to be an option in that niche of single-file databases.
Re: Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google forms + spreadsheet
Access is the "too much for Excel, not enough for an RDBMS" solution. If it's too much for Excel, it's way too much for Google Spreadsheets, which is far behind Excel in functionality.
My organization recently adopted Office 365. One of the new apps was "PowerApps", a web-based GUI app builder. I popped open an example app inspected a button and, to my horror, I found the program logic was Excel syntax one-liners. When I checked the data binding for the app, it pointed to an XLSX spreadsheet on OneDrive. Time is a flat circle...
Re: Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
My first real paying gig was Access 97 (I'm old). They actually taught it at my university at the time in the MIS/CIS path. I built a credentialing system for a small HMO. I was able to get it to support over 100 people, including report load. I split out the database from the front end (forms/reports) and put the database files on an NT4 share. When we grew and it started to buckle under load, I created an additiona…
I got started using Access 2, so I'm older...
Learned 3NF in an Access 2 class, so I might be older... =)
Re: Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die
#56The reason that both Access and Excel use is so prevalent in corporate “shadow IT” land is because there are many parts of the business that have problems for which only a negative or marginal business-case can be made for IT to solve it (given the “get out of bed” costs of most IT departments). It’s a barrier-to-entry problem. Excel and Access are cheap enough and fly under the corporate IT radar (no involvement nee…
My dream is to build a modern take of the fox/dbase family. I starting with the inner language
Access, as concept, is great. Is exactly what many need.
But it have a lot of small deficiencies that make it disliked by developers. I have used FoxPro, and it have almost all the right things instead (Fox is Access, but goooood!... except a bit less user friendly).
I wish I could dedicate to build this. Is weird to me why this kind of tool have so little support?
Re: Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that Open/Libre-Office have options for this. You can also use Access as a front end for another db (odbc) backend pretty easily. I'd probably do a web app myself, but that's just me. I know a lot of people that cut their programming teeth on Access apps, including distributed ones.
OO/LO "Base" is a pile crap in my opinion. People often develop smallish CRUD apps in MS-Access in two weeks or less. It's up and going without fuss and muss and without fiddling with servers, containers, DBA's, etc. You have to admire its nimbleness. Yes, the database "crashes" fairly often, but it's easy to make frequent round-robin-style file-based backups using Windows Scheduler and DOS scripts. Most databases ca…
Whats wrong with Base? I haven't used it so I don't have any preconceptions about it.
Re: Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die
#58The reason that both Access and Excel use is so prevalent in corporate “shadow IT” land is because there are many parts of the business that have problems for which only a negative or marginal business-case can be made for IT to solve it (given the “get out of bed” costs of most IT departments). It’s a barrier-to-entry problem. Excel and Access are cheap enough and fly under the corporate IT radar (no involvement nee…
I don't disagree, but isn't it a sign of much deeper issues if this "Shadow IT" land exists at your company in the first place? Why is it that experienced programmers can't efficiently solve a problem that a business user can handle in Access?
Are they under-staffed? Neck-deep in spaghetti code? Lacking business knowledge and the opportunity to acquire it? Bottle-necked by a lack of business analysts or testers?
I hear about this too often and nobody seems to think it's a major problem. IT departments can have a queue that's 2 years deep and people don't even bat an eye, they just think "Oh, that's how IT works!" And that's not even taking into account all the requests people aren't submitting because they've given up hope of getting any dev time.
Re: Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die
#59A number of years ago I was in the Navy and worked in an electronics shop on an aircraft carrier. We were responsible for calibrating and repairing all the test and measurement equipment for the entire ship as well as the squadrons that we carried with us. Easily over 10k individual pieces of equipment, each of which had to be calibrated on a specific schedule. Most of this data was managed centrally, and we sent/received DB updates a couple times a week. However, just managing our workload and operations efficiently required other data which was not part of this database. I had no choice but to build my own solution, and the only real option was MS Access given the barren IT resources available on a deployed aircraft carrier.
But man, was it a fucking lifesaver. Just for one example, we often had to send equipment out to different labs since we didn’t have the capability to test them, and shipping stuff required a standard military shipping document with various mundane pieces of information about the stuff being sent. Creating these documents was a tedious process of looking up the data manually and then typing it into a Word file. I just recreated the document as an Access form, with fields that would populate from a query. Creating the shipping documents went from 30-45 mins to essentially the click of a single button.
Re: Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die
#60The reason that both Access and Excel use is so prevalent in corporate “shadow IT” land is because there are many parts of the business that have problems for which only a negative or marginal business-case can be made for IT to solve it (given the “get out of bed” costs of most IT departments). It’s a barrier-to-entry problem. Excel and Access are cheap enough and fly under the corporate IT radar (no involvement nee…
I don't disagree, but isn't it a sign of much deeper issues if this "Shadow IT" land exists at your company in the first place? Why is it that experienced programmers can't efficiently solve a problem that a business user can handle in Access? Are they under-staffed? Neck-deep in spaghetti code? Lacking business knowledge and the opportunity to acquire it? Bottle-necked by a lack of business analysts or testers? I he…
Re: Why is it that experienced programmers can't efficiently solve a problem that a business user can handle in Access?
Because existing web UI standards suck rotting ass to hell and back. The standard was not meant for CRUD and still isn't even if you add gajillion layers of (buggy) JavaScript to emulate a real GUI.
We! Need! A! Real! GUI! Standard!