What will we do after Access? [closed]

Answer 1

I don't think that Access is going away anytime soon. The beta of office 2010 is out with an updated Access included and the Microsoft blogs are hyping the features of Access 14 (the version after 2010) which include improved Access Projects (.ADPs) with better support for SQL Server 2005/2008 and better .Net integration.

If i were to look for a new integrated database development system providing front and backend features Oracle APEX would be the main contender. Front ends are web based requiring no runtime on the client, the whole system is free to download and instal (express edition) and given a few years the entrance barrier for new users hopefully will be reduced so it is something laymen can dabble in.

Answer 2

There is a continuum of developers in the world, rather than hard and fast boundaries. People range from business managers and IT professionals. I consider myself to be an advanced amateur developer, somewhere between the two. As such I use MS Access at work to organise a large amount of data in a small architectural office including timesheets, financials and architectural specifications. Sure, the application now is a mass of stinking p** that has grown over almost five years.

I've been searching for something better than Access for ages- I can create simple apps in VB.NET however the learning curve is huge from VBA. I've looked at all sorts of options. Often you need Crystal Reports to get any kind of reporting capability, or the IDE is non-intuitive, or linking a field to a data object takes ten minutes each time, or there is not integration with other office products at all. The boss is not going to pay for something that costs a bomb, either. I'd love to get away from Access, but nothing I've looked at gets anywhere near ticking all the boxes.

Answer 3

I welcome the day when Access breathes it last breath and joins the likes of Clippy.

Access is well-intentioned, but it has become a crutch. Even in large companies with able IT staffs, Access applications can run rampant, providing a pain point for knowing the global landscape when it comes to products to maintain. Linked Access databases that point at other datasources, unmaintained Access applications, and just shear flexibility are issues, in my opinion.

I think that Access is actually too powerful, too flexible, and too extensible for its own good. In Microsoft's well-intentioned attempt to bring rapid development to the desktop database realm, it really has opened a Pandora's box. Look at it from another perspective, too. Assume that a company has a few applications that are written in Access. The developer who wrote them leaves. These applications are just important enough that they still need to be used, but not important enough that IT gets the approval to port them to a more technologically capable platform.

Now, the situation is that if no one on the team knows Access, it is requirement for the new developer. This means that you might have to pass on a developer who is the most technically well-rounded and the best fit if he does not have legacy chops. I speak from experience, on this. We are down to two legacy Access applications, and are trying feverishly to convince of the needs to either incorporate the functionality into related, code-based projects or into new projects of their own. I have one developer with Access "chops", and am not going to base a candidate search on whether someone knows Access or not in the event that he leaves.

Answer 4

Access definitely has both pro's and cons, it's just another tool to use but not abuse. Every adult job I've ever had used ran on windows, so Access or something like it will exist. I feel sorry for the places that are stuck in Access quicksand or lost in excel hell. But are we forgetting that all that can be corrected and better yet prevented with a bad ass bi team and proper training.

Answer 5

The problem with replacing Access - and replacing Access is the problem which stops me in the vast majority of cases recommending a move to Ubuntu or SUSE desktop to my business clients - is not that Access is widely used for its database facilities: it's not except with the most Micky Mouse of user-written departmental applications which are relatively trivial to re-code. The problem is the medium sized applications where the data was migrated long ago to the corporate SQL Server.

These are a nightmare. They're often badly written (I've acquired a fair few to administer over the years) and encapsulate reams of business logic. Recoding them in anything is generally quoted at a couple of man-months at the best - usually twice or three times that, and it's unusual for a department of the size these are found in to have the budget to support that. Moreover although the arrival of AJAX and good desktop-like controls has meant that this is at least now possible in theory, in practice these are of then massively integrated with the rest of the MS Office desktop and virtually impossible to disentangle with out users seeing a drop in usability in the short to medium term - which is a show stopper in itself.

I really do not know what the solution is, apart from the slow replacement of creating new systems with other methods and hoping for the gradual demise of existing apps. Trouble is I think Access could well be the Cobol of the 1990s - it'll be around for ever supporting legacy apps because it's too costly to rewrite from scratch.

As an aside, does anyone else coming from a non-Access traditional Win32 coding background have the experience of finding that the standard of coding in even professionally written Access apps is generally below average? Although superficial (but important) stuff like formatting and variable names are generally fine I find over and over again that program structuring is poor. I know that this may often be because these apps have grown like Topsy, and VBA really isn't conducive to good coding anyway, but even allowing for these factors things generally seem worse than one might expect.

Answer 6

I don't think MS has any intention whatsoever of getting rid of Access. They may transform it into more of an end-user tool than a programmer's tool, but it is never going away. The forking of the Jet database engine into the traditional Jet 4 version that ships with every copy of Windows (because Active Directory uses Jet 4 as its data store) and the version that is owned by the Access development group (the ACE, with its ACCDB file format, which is, de facto, Jet 4.5 or maybe Jet 5).

Access is a hugely popular and useful application and functions in a whole host of levels within any number of organizations, large and small.

Why is there no open-source alternative to Access?

Because it's way too hard to create such a complex piece of software that does so many different things well.