Solved Your opinions please

[Gasman]

@Gasman I hope you don't think this person knows what he is talking about.

I do not. I have already said I think the statement is BS here and also said so on that other site

Plus he is a she, and from what @Edgar_ mentioned appears to be a reasonable Excel user.
Then she has the cheek to ask if I would be prepared to tutor her.

 

[NauticalGent]

Morning Paul, your post comes at a very interesting time for me. The agency that contracts the company I work for has asked if there was a way to move the application from Access to a more "robust" (his words, not mine) web-based platform. His concerns are all the tired arguments that I will not recapitulate here.

We have a "summit" (again, his term) this month where I will do my best to assure him that at this time, with what we have, Access is the best tool for the job. The real challenge I have is that my immediate supervisor just recently retired from the same agency that contracts my company - and what is worse, she was a big-wig for that agency's IT department. In other words, his desire to move away from Access is music to her ears. She in enamored with this thing called Qlik - Qlik sucks.

But, another individual who works for the agency has been dabbling with a company/platform called ServiceNow. I did some research on it and it appears that it may be a viable replacement. The agency does have some site licensees and ServiceNow even offers a multitude of free courses (up to and including application developer) and will even provide you a free instance on their server for the coursework.

I am one week into it and I haven't gotten to the good stuff yet but so far, it looks promising. If interested, I will keep you informed with my progress...

 

[Gasman]

One thing people do not seem to take into account, is that whilst web access is very nice to have, (I use it for the Xero Accounting system), that it opens it up to everyone, not just the company people when internal, so that could be a huge problem, security wise, and there are plenty out there trying to exploit any crack in the security.

In my last place of work, we used Access over the net with a company that supplied an IFA package. I was constantly contacting the developer to report the odd bug or two and knowing Access helped to identify them. The developer always appreciated the feedback.
We just had access to a Windows server where our DB was available to us. I have no idea as to whether it was FE & BE or a single DB, as we only got the forms/reports, though thinking about that now, I would suspect FE/BE so the same FE could be used pointing to the respective client BE db's?

 

[Steve R.]

MS Access has been a great database and can still be useful into the future. Nobody has killed COBOL yet! Unfortunately Access can now be considered "dated", something hard to welcome on a website devoted to MS Access.

For those implementing new database solutions, the future is now in the realm of developing web-style interfaces based on opensource databases such as MariaDB and using Apache as the server. This of course also means learning a variety of new programing tools such as PHP, HTML, CSS, etc. A major benefit to this approach is that it "frees" the developers and users from being dependent on the MS Windows environment.

As a side observation; this website (in a prescient sense) already has a sub-forum devoted to Web Design and Development that could be expanded to meet the needs of those who wish to implement MS Access like solutions based on using opensource databases. Web design should be viewed as being operational on a local LAN.

 

[gemma-the-husky]

And there's a whole new lot of stuff to learn to become proficient. Not easy to find another 1000 hours.

 

[GPGeorge]

A few random thoughts.

Perhaps I'm missing the point here but WiFi is just another way to connect to a LAN. Even at a personal level I have a mapped drive on my laptop which is wirelessly connected to my network. People seem to somehow equate WiFi with just being web based/cloud based.

Also it is typically the medium sized organization that are going WiFi only: small users in a single office have the ability to be both with just a couple of cheap cables and large users with main frame systems will continue to use wired LANs for efficiency.

The comment about being Windows based only is valid one , but we should not forget the most popular DBMS on the Mac remains Access running on a Windows emulator.

As for multi user development - it's simple enough but requires more rigorous co-ordination than other platform. Not as easy as it was in VSS days, but as with any multi developer project it is a management problem not a software problem.

I would love a multi platform replacement for Access but I don't see it happening.

And lastly I get irked by the assumption (especially prevalent on this site) that the only relevant BE alternative for enhancing Access based storage is SQL Server. My personal favourite was always Oracle as it was so much more powerful than SQL Server and the administration of the database was much simpler and more coherent than SQL Server. I have to admit that my experience is now several years out of date.

To misquote Monty Python "Access (I'm) not dead yet".

Point One:

I think you might have missed the point regarding WiFi. The reason so many Access developers are cautious is that WiFi was historically less stable than a wired connection. Access back ends being subject to corruption due to network disruptions amplifies that problem. Or maybe it's the other way round, the problem of corruption in a back end accdb is amplified by a less stable network. If you have a 100% rock solid WiFi network, that's not so significant, though.

Point Two:

Who pays the licensing costs for your backends? There is no doubt that Oracle is a great database. I worked with an Oracle Data Warehouse briefly in a corporate role. I found it to be reliable, although I don't know that our usage put any kind of heavy load on it.

However, that comes at a cost unless I'm misinformed.

https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/corporate/pricing/technology-price-list-070617.pdf

SQL Server 2022—Pricing | Microsoft

Explore the pricing plans for the Azure-enabled SQL Server 2022.

www.microsoft.com

Granted, licensing costs is an opaque art and making apples-to-apples comparisons can be tricky. It does look like Oracle licensing is more expensive and that is, for most of us, a consideration.

On the other hand, SQL Server Express is free to try and free to use, even in production. Perhaps the prevelance of SQL Server recommendations takes that into consideration.

I imagine there is a comparable free version of Oracle?

 

[Steve R.]

Licensing costs can be minimized if not avoided entirely. There will always be that one application that somehow just requires a licensing fee.

There is no cost to using Apache as your database server. Additionally, the use of Apache and opensource databases "frees" you of many of MS licensing fees.

12 Top Open Source Databases to Consider

Learn about 12 open source databases and source available technologies, including information on key features, use cases, licensing and commercial support.

www.techtarget.com

Please note that I am suggesting alternatives to MS Access for new implementations; not for existing applications unless you feel exceptionally motivated.

 

[Edgar_]

My servers cost like 6~10 USD a month
> Rent Linux VPS
> Install NodeJS
> Import DB
> Import backend code
> Start server

The backend can be consumed by MS Access, Excel, Mobile apps, Web apps, TVs, anything that can make HTTP requests, even refrigerators do it nowadays. In this day and age, it's up to how much you want to learn, and even that is getting easier and easier. I deployed this book search thing for this forum like 8 months ago and it's still there, powered by who knows and it costs me $0.

 

[DickyP]

Point Two:

Who pays the licensing costs for your backends? There is no doubt that Oracle is a great database. I worked with an Oracle Data Warehouse briefly in a corporate role. I found it to be reliable, although I don't know that our usage put any kind of heavy load on it.

I probably shouldn't have mentioned my preference for Oracle. It distracted from my main point that too many people assume that the ONLY alternative back-end is SQL Server.

I was lucky with licencing costs but suffered as developer because my company went from DB5, to SQL Server, to Oracle as the decisions about servers was made for us as the company swapped products for other reasons. Talk about rushed changes and running concurrent versions with different back-ends during conversion and data migration.

 

[Pat Hartman]

It distracted from my main point that too many people assume that the ONLY alternative back-end is SQL Server.

I've used DB2 (my personal favorite and first BE - before Jet even), Sybase, Oracle, Postgre, Oracle, SQL Server, and one more whose name escapes me at the moment.

DB2 was what actually sold me on the utility of Access as a RAD tool back in the mid-90's.

I've also gone through three BE conversions as clients changed databases in the early days. Luckily, I was using Access SQL and so the only impact was having to relink the BE.

DB-Engines Ranking

Popularity ranking of database management systems.

db-engines.com

 

[Gasman]

I've used DB2 (my personal favorite and first BE - before Jet even), Sybase, Oracle, Postgre, Oracle, SQL Server, and one more whose name escapes me at the moment.

DB2 was what actually sold me on the utility of Access as a RAD tool back in the mid-90's.

I've also gone through three BE conversions as clients changed databases in the early days. Luckily, I was using Access SQL and so the only impact was having to relink the BE.

DB-Engines Ranking

Popularity ranking of database management systems.

db-engines.com

Wow, I do not even see IDSII there? :-(

Honeywell Bull Codasyl Database System.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

The U.S. Navy had a few different DB engines. We had something called ShareBase (UNIX O/S) that used SQLnet protocols. It was a small machine. We beat the hell out of it and had to upgrade machine hardware TWICE. Beat the hell out of the 2nd and 3rd platfroms. As things expanded, we started expanding into various DBs. By majority, we had SQL Server - but we ALSO had ORACLE Enterprise Server. Access was used for department level specialty work - which is where I sometimes stepped in. Given the more obscure nature of some of those projects, I'll gently avoid specifying WHAT I stepped in.

I found ORACLE easier to understand when trying to interface with it from my mainframe O/S to do a cross-system consistency check to verify that a particular process was actually doing something. That was to support detection of hung or idle processes because we had a limited number of simultaneous-use licenses and I had to trim careless users.