I still use Access from time to time for cleaning up data before importing it into SQL Server. Importing dirty data into Access is so much easier than with SSMS. Once cleaned up, SSMS gladly gobbles up the cleaned data from Access.
Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die
61–70 of 365 posts
Re: Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die
#62The 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…
Access is the perfect tool for an intelligent, technically-minded person with limited programming experience to create an application to replace spreadsheets. There are a lot of those kinds of people out there, and they're extremely useful in introducing minor optimizations that other people wouldn't be able to find. Access is for that guy who says "I know there's a better way to do this," but doesn't have access (no…
These are excellent points, I think it’s underestimated how difficult it is to get approval and budget for a small project that doesn’t directly contribute to the bottom line or have huge savings. These small but impactful solutions using Access act as both a stepping stone to greater skill sets, a way to build POCs for non-tech or low-tech people, and to avoid months of politics in big organizations.
I’ve had projects that were red-taped before getting off the ground due to resources being placed elsewhere. I then take those project ideas, and instead build them in Access as a POC using shared drives, splitting the database, etc. By the time I have 100 users saying how useful the application is in a couple months, other bigger projects haven’t even finished a project plan. Meanwhile we’re then ready to scale the solution using an appropriate stack and basically can just say “replicate our POC features but improve performance, security, accessibility, etc”. So far that’s worked pretty well for me.
In summary: find people’s Excel files with a mess of VBA and formulas —> see if the use case should be expanded —> build POC in Access without permission/budget from a bunch of people —> see how it goes and then plan to scale with the evidence you’ve gathered from your POC.
Re: Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die
#63I used to work as part of a "Shadow IT Group" within a fortune 50 defense contractor. We built fairly complex solutions within MS Office because we were denied the tools to do the job properly. The most complex program I ever wrote in access was controlling electrical arrangements. This database was synchronized nightly across 3 different domains and would routinely have in excess of 50 concurrent users. I think the largest table had around 500,000 rows. The beauty of development in Office is the price tag and the time from concept to implementation. There was very little we could not accomplish with a combination of Access, Excel and sometimes a little wsh.
Re: Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
With 64-bit Excel capable of working with up to 4GB files, it sometimes feels like Excel itself ate/replaced Access for certain classes of business and shadow IT use.
Re: Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was no "dbase 1", it started as "dbase 2" because Ashton Tate didn't want the product to sound premature.
To be fair, they probably mean dBase II and dBase III. Although they could mean Vulcan and dBase II, which is less likely. I started my "database" programming career on dBase II in the early 80's and never bumped into Vulcan.
dBASE III and dBASE III+ were different enough that they are generally considered two different "big release" products.
I used to automate a lot of grunt work by putting code in dBASE tables. It's real easy to do that. You can make a sophisticated menu system using mostly just tables with code embedded. I was quite productive back then without having to type a lot.
Re: Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die
#66The 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…
Everything needs to be self-service as much as possible.
Need a SQL Server / PostgreSQL DB for your project, got click some buttons on a page and get back a URI for your database.
Automate, automate, automate.
Re: Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die
#67This is the question I always wanted to ask, I almost wrote an Ask HN... Who use Microsoft Access in 2019?! An obvious case is creating a glorified/enhanced Excel for some specific office tasks, another case is that some applications use ".mdb" backend. But that's all? edit: What I'm interested in is cases of using Access for something other than a specific Excel-like office task - it seems Access is still used for s…
Why would anyone use Access in 2019 when they can use SQLite instead? Is it because Access has a graphical interface?
Exactly. And a nice programming language. The engine doesn’t really matter. You could create something like Access on top of SQLite.
Re: Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die
#68The 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…
I have seen all of these symptoms at numerous large companies. The backlog is years deep and the costs associated with engaging the professional programmers could be staggering. The truth is, not all solutions need anything more robust than what Office can provide.
Re: Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
An acquaintance of mine is an accountant. He uses it when his spreadsheets get too big/busy/complex. He's not "technical", but he is quite intelligent and is very familiar with Excel, has even written a few VB macros here and there. It's perfect for him. I assume the thousands of people just like him are the answer to your question.
Thanks for the story. I can imagine that, as I said > creating a glorified Excel for some specific office tasks What I'm interested in is cases of using Access for something other than a specific office task - it seems Access is still used for some serious business in many businesses (pun not intended).
Well, my point is that I think it's entirely possible that the only real use for MS Access is as a glorified Excel spreadsheet. That seems like a fine use case with a pretty significant market share! When you get right down to it, that's all most small businesses that use "real" relational databases do with them, either.
Re: Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
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: Whats wrong with Base?
When I first learned MS-Access, I barely had to read the manual. I could discover most functionality by clicking around. With Base, I had to constantly dig in the manual and still couldn't get it to do many ordinary CRUD idioms.