Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die

I've only played with Access once in Uni so it's a bit hard to compare for me, but it sounds pretty similar.

I use it as my own version of Shadow IT for my wife's business when im just too time constrained to make her proper web apps to do stuff, and she's too reluctant to spend any money on things, I just whip up a solution in Airtable. She has a CRM I made her for managing her students and their balances. Works well and was super fast to put together.

It's pretty crazy capable as Airtable has various kinds of built in functions for math and string manipulation, plus it can do various kinds of relations, joins, aggregates and rollups. Heck the resulting table even exposes an API!

The only thing I can't really seem to do is business rule validation stuff that a typical CRUD app would contain.

Hey David - love what you’re doing with Retool. I think it’s a good solution for the front end piece of this challenge. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t Retool focus on working with existing enterprise databases and APIs? If so then I think the missing piece is a DBaaS with great guardrails.

Access (and to a lesser extent, Excel) empower anyone to model their data and manipulate it without asking permission. The problem is they don’t scale well, there are no backups, they don’t show up in a data catalog anywhere, no integration with enterprise SSO, etc. They do benefit from file-focused solutions for these issues (eg the Access file lives on a network drive which is backed up) but they fall far short from what you expect from a production database.

So my challenge is: how can I let anyone in my organization create a new database, with all the backup/authentication/discovery/scalability out of the box, for them to connect to Retool?

Hello.

I made my MVP v2 in Access. Currently testing it and getting it checked out by a few founders, then I will release it, for free. Well, almost free, email collection.

It took me 10 months, which is fast considering the Excel version (MVP v1) took me 4 years, but then the Excel version has the whole concept from beginning to end, and there was a lot to learn, still a lot to learn really. The Access version covers only the first 9 steps. What I made was a startup system that guides founders from idea to early traction.

Access was not my first choice. I thought after the Excel version that I would use either a no or low code solution, a RAD tool, or some sort of visual development thing. As you have guessed I am not a programmer. I did dabble in BASIC, well a bit more than dabble, when my dad got me a Speccy. I enjoyed it, there is beauty in logic no matter how Phaedrus cuts it, but it was a means to an end really. From Draw and Beep through to Deluxe Paint 3 and OctaMed, it was about expression. I am not saying programming isn't a form of expression, but it is the long way round to me.

A few years later, I had to learn some Turbo Pascal, in order to make a database I think, talking 24 years ago, so I can't actually remember. But I do remember being bored out of my mind. So, I quit my computing degree. It was strange, I had an Amiga I could make things on. My college had just got some multi-media computers, yet in university, we had these stiff monochrome 486's. They didn't sing, didn't dance, looked awful but they did go a long way. Sheesh Kitkat.

Second time round at university many years later, I had to face programming again, this time it was Java, JavaScript and Object Orientated Delphi. OOD I liked, the other two I tolerated, for it was just a programming module rather than the whole thing.

After I had finished the Excel version, obtained feedback, tweaked and modified this and that, it was onto MVP v2. I looked at a shed-load of stuff, Bubble, Kexi, Lazarus, My Visual Database, Delphi 10.3, App Builder, Zoho Creator, Cross UI, Airtable, to name but a few. There were issues with all of them:

1. Not enough control and/or functions 2. Cumbersome and tedious to do anything 3. A sense of detachment as if I was having an OBE 4. Database; I don't care about connections, stacks and what-not, just sit in the background, and save stuff. 5. Process, and output what I tell you to do, and send outputs so they are inputs in other places 6. Questionable documentation 7. Customer support non existent, unresponsive or just prone to sending me back to the documentation I checked before hand 8. Tutorials and lessons showing how to make clones of well-known startups, or rudimentary apps 9. Holding me and anybody I share it with over a barrel 10. Unnecessarily complicated

So anyway, I decided fudge it, let me take a look at Access, it's been sat there for years. Many other people have it, although not Mac users. I am not a complete novice when it comes to Access, I know a little about 1,2 and 3 step normalisation, although I didn't strictly stick to it. Yeah I had to learn a bit of SQL and VBA, and any questions I had were already answered countless times on forums, although usage and disagreement of ! and . was annoying.

I was obviously unable to make what I really wanted, but I was able to make something close enough for what I deemed as necessary at this moment in time, in order to at least give a user a taste of what I propose. The minimum part of the MVP had to cut across the board, like a slice of cake, bit of everything.

I got asked a few times why am I using or used Access. I could have mentioned the above list, but the crux of it was, to me it was the tool for the job, with a support network around it, with very few chains and shackles, at a stretch I could do it on my own. I couldn't give a hoot about stacks, dependencies, libraries, etc. The latest languages, scalability, etc, whats that to do with an MVP?

I am proud of what I made. I won't be pulling out my who gives a toss but me violin in a public forum, but it's a tough lonely slog. It was my idea, and I had to use what I could to bring it to some sort of fruition. A small stepping stone in the right direction.

Cheers, Ace.

I'm not sure if a cloud version could ever replace access. Access is already paid for, works with on premise data, is easily deployed (no browser version madness), is ubiquitous, is easy to recover from bus factors (search the victims computer for .mdbs) and is easy to control access too.

Salesforce seems like a particularly bad solution, you end up with a small army of high priced, low skilled salesforce contractors and a heap of vendor lock in.