Reply to post: Access

Access

Access applications could be dreadful, particularly when produced by a user to get a job done; but as usual, a bit of thought could produce a useful and stable solution. Access 97 was OK, Access 95 was dreadful. We produced a number of applications for $1million-$10million p.a. organizations. The rough rule was: Always split the application into a front-end (forms, code, and reports); and a back-end (data, relations, and rules/integrity). An Access back-end was usually OK for ~5 concurrent users and 10s of thousands of rows of data on a reliable network - For important data, or more users, or an imperfect network, replacing the back end with an MS SQL Server (V6 at the time) could produce a fast and reliable application. For Y2K we replaced several green screen mini-computer applications with Access/SQL Server systems - Typically a few hundred thousand rows and 20 concurrent users.

Originally I had been developing applications with traditional Oracle type systems; but after we prototyped something in Access for a customer with the intention of upscaling to a “proper system”, the customer said the prototype works fine so why would you do that?

We picked up quite a lot of work because most of our competitors were doing what we had been: Big databases with lots of code. Typically our prototyping took a couple of weeks with another week or so to upscale to a Server version. Having said that, the initial learning curve to get around undocumented bugs and performance issues was quite long, but I had been playing Access from version 1 and using version 2 for small systems. One reason that Access was not popular with professional developers was that it required 6-8MB of RAM when many desktops had <=4MB, but we usually quoted to upgrade the punters’ PCs and still came in cheaper than the typical MS VB-SQL/Powerbuilder shops who would quote several months for development time. I’ve been retired for a while, but the company still has many customers using updated applications with the latest versions of Access and SQL Server.