331–340 of 365 posts
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I wonder if sqlite could become this in the future.
I wonder how much effort it would take to build a desktop application providing a similar user experience to Access, using SQLite.
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Hi! I'm working on a project called Retool ( https://retool.com ), and it's basically Access, in the cloud. We connect to any sort of cloud database / API, and let you build UIs quickly. It's good for building forms that write back to APIs, tables that read data from databases, etc. I'd really appreciate HN's feedback on this -- if anybody has thoughts -- I'd love to hear them! I'm also david@ if you'd rather email m…
Half of the point of Access is that it's not in the cloud; it's a locally installed app that doesn't even require network access or admin rights.
Anyone want to suggest alternates? What's the "whip it up in a few hours" for "power users" today?
Don't run things on an unmanaged box on the floor in your office anymore. No more "My S.Q.L." no more flat file DBs saved in CIFS. If you have to ask these questions you're not the power user whipping up production code in a few hours with no framework or managed service you feel like you should still be.
The 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…
I’m a Mac user but there’s plenty of Windows machines with Office lying around, and my first gut instinct was to start throwing something together and importing the Excel file to populate the DB, and construct ‘robust’(er) queries & scripts for interacting with and getting reports from the data.
Perfect? No way. But within a couple of days I was able to get something working more reliably and (albeit temporarily) “shored up” a major calamity waiting to happen. Am I proud of my work? Absolutely not. But it was quick, cheap, and cheerful. Eventually when urgency has lessened and there’s more budget (in terms of mind-space, time, money) we can start looking for developers that will take my kludge and make it into something more bullet-proof.
For now, the leap from Excel to Access has been a huge leap forward (the kind that the physically illiterate offhandedly describe as a “quantum loop”, not realising that quantum leaps, though discrete in nature, are tiny).
>Clearly, there are people still interested in Access, even if it’s only because they’re trying to untangle the mess left for them by a previous generation of hobbyist programmer. My job function entails extending and maintaining an MS Access database that our small company still uses as its primary tool for data entry and reporting. It started on Access 97, moving up through a few new releases until about 2010, whic…
If you want to do a deep-dive into Computer Science and transition to a full-time software role, then you might want to look into Lambda School[3]. I don't have personal experience with them, but several people I trust claim their results are excellent.
[1] https://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html
[2] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.2/intro/tutorial01/
[3] https://lambdaschool.com/courses/full-stack-web-development
I have a special place in my heart for Access, its where I first started making money writing software and learned SQL and VB. Its where I really felt like I was making something that solved real world problems for people, quickly at that. It was actually amazing how far it could scale, you could put a shared MDB file out on a Novell network share and have 30 concurrent users with no server app at all, users just dou…
Printable reports is so 90's. Back then you printed reports and shared reports on paper. In meetings everyone gets a printed copy of the report. Today web is the way to share reports, and you project reports on to a big screen in meetings.
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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.
I wrote quite a few tens of thousands of lines of code in Clipper (using the BRIEF editor) all the way up until ~1998. By then I'd more or less switched to VB+SQL Server.
Gotta say I really loved working with Clipper, it was a really nice superset of dBase but had many of it's own specific design features.
Is 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…
Check out Oracle application Express (APEX). HN loves to hate Oracle, but it is a great tool for a building crud applications and dashboards.
The largest drawback is that it comes with an Oracle database bundled, so many of the savings in development time are wasted dealing with it.
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I'm not clear on why you are referring to Access as an alternative to a "SQL based application". Access's SQL dialect is extremely annoying sometimes, but using SQL is a very significant (if not the most) reason for utilizing it rather than Excel. I went around and around trying to find a way to query Excel "tables" with SQL or something similar, but eventually gave up. There is something called DAX, but it seems dif…
I use DAX in Power BI which I believe shares a common data model with excel. Dax is powerful but sometimes frustrating. When you need bidirectional relationships you end up making custom measures to keep the whole model performant. Depending on the scale of the problem being looked at it becomes a mess. But Power BI is the access of dashboard world...
I'm stuck with Office 2013 for the time being and can't upgrade or install anything. If I could use anything, I'd probably prefer to go back to SSRS. Maybe Informatica, or OBIEE or something.
I'm biased by spending so many years writing SQL, but I found it extremely cumbersome to do basic things in DAX even after I figured out how, and haven't seen any obvious advantages. But I do know for a fact that software newer than 2013 adds some crucial features that would make it better.
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This is like saying why would anyone use a Toyota RAV4 when they can get a 400+ hp LS3 crate engine from Chevy. Is it because of the quality of the dashboard plastics?
I really like this analogy. The question you were responding to has been asked - in one form or another - so many times on this thread that its clear that those developing software and business tools are completely out of touch with users and power users of those tools.