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Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die

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Re: Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die

#231

Post by ComodoHacker »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #172
drblast wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, similar story here. The nuclear department on my carrier needed to produce this monthly report for training hours that would take them a ton of manual effort. There was no budget at all for any kind of automation but Access was on every machine. I know what I'm doing with databases. I never want to use Access if I don't have to. But it has the enviable property of "no server administration required" which meant…

I wonder if sqlite could become this in the future.

In the future perhaps, but now Access has a big advantage for multi-user environment: fine-grained locking. In SQLite writes are basically serialized.

Re: Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die

#233

Post by rym_ »

I was once (or maybe still am) one of these power users. Started out with writing VBA macro's in excel to automate some work, probably created some monstrosities in excel. Then migrated over to MS Access and eventually taught myself proper (MS-)SQL which I have been developing in for over 9 years.

One of my crutches is exactly that, that SQL is more or less the only language I have mastered and when I while I feel like I am skilled enough to develop complex databases, I am always lost at creating a proper frontend for end-users. Quite often I will resort to MS Access as a light frontend (holding no data and minimal coding), just a bunch of forms.

Does anyone know an alternative to this? If I just want some forms but don't want to dive into web-based applications, what alternatives to access exist?

Re: Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die

#234

Post by endymi0n »

rym_ wrote: post #233

I was once (or maybe still am) one of these power users. Started out with writing VBA macro's in excel to automate some work, probably created some monstrosities in excel. Then migrated over to MS Access and eventually taught myself proper (MS-)SQL which I have been developing in for over 9 years. One of my crutches is exactly that, that SQL is more or less the only language I have mastered and when I while I feel li…

Airtable is widely lauded at being a modern, web-based version of Access. Haven‘t tried myself, but it‘s looking promising.

Re: Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die

#235

Post by rym_ »

endymi0n wrote: post #234
rym_ wrote: post #233

I was once (or maybe still am) one of these power users. Started out with writing VBA macro's in excel to automate some work, probably created some monstrosities in excel. Then migrated over to MS Access and eventually taught myself proper (MS-)SQL which I have been developing in for over 9 years. One of my crutches is exactly that, that SQL is more or less the only language I have mastered and when I while I feel li…

Airtable is widely lauded at being a modern, web-based version of Access. Haven‘t tried myself, but it‘s looking promising.

I was checking it out just now but I feel quite happy with the SQL-Server side of things, I am basically looking for a more modern way to present forms to the user to interact with my database, without having to learn C#/VB.Net or web dev. Or maybe that's just what I need to do to move away from MS Access as a frontend.

Re: Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die

#236

Post by LegitShady »

perl4ever wrote: post #175
mdorazio wrote: post #5

As 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…

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...

Re: Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die

#238

Post by colonwqbang »

dev_dull wrote: post #217
jdfellow wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much effort it would take to build a desktop application providing a similar user experience to Access, using SQLite.

I tried doing this once with Go, hoping for a static binary, but SQLite library requires glibc. There’s a huge need for a sql-compatible sqite-like database for this purpose in Go.

So, link in glibc statically?

I may be wrong, but sqlite is used a lot on Android which uses bionic, not glibc right? So it seems like there should be hope of switching to another libc if you need.

Re: Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die

#239

Post by Bombthecat »

lstamour wrote: post #230
ako wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you can use Access as the front end to SQLite? During my internship 25 years ago I build a system to register aircraft accidents and near accidents. This system used access 1.0 (Windows 3.1) as the front end, storing the data in Oracle 6, I think connected through Odbc.

Yup, ODBC still works: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/administer-odbc-dat... though because this is Microsoft and we can’t have nice things, it might not: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/access/... For SQLite there’s https://github.com/softace/sqliteodbc but at that point I might pick a different DB for a more established ODBC driver. Or just use Access...

But this requires admin access to install? No?

Re: Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die

#240

Post by Bombthecat »

codeulike wrote: post #84
SigmundA wrote: post #30

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…

Salesforce, the core database/CRUD bit of it if you ignore all the stuff they've purchased and tacked-on in the last few years, is essentially 'Access in the cloud', in terms of the sorts of things you can do and the ease with which you can do it, and how far you can stretch it before it starts to get cumbersome. And yes, they are making a killing. edit: And if that sounds easy, imagine how you would go about upgradi…

I'm more on the side of: Salesforce is excel online :)
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