Re: MS Access usefulness and size restrictions

"Daniel A. Morgan" <dmorgan_at_exesolutions.com> wrote in message <news:3B258F6F.391498F0_at_exesolutions.com>...

> Larry Linson wrote:
>
> > But, of course, Wayne, if you carried through on your threat to PLONK me,
> > not read my contributions to this thread, and not respond to me, then all
> > this is lost on you, so you will keep on believing that a very expensive,
> > high installation, high maintenance database is the "bees knees" for tiny
> > applications and you'll keep on making a fool of yourself in public by
> > spouting off and showing your ignorance.
> >
> > As Hank Williams, Sr. said, "I'm sorry for you, my friend."
>
> I will agree with you provided the following:
>
> 1. You know for a fact you will never need to scale your application for
> more data and/or more users.

The techniques for creating an Access application that can be painlessly "upsized" to a client/server back-end RDBMS are well known, except to certain willfully ignorant religious zealots.

> 2. Security is irrelevant.

True, there apparently are cracks to Access security, even though the vast majority of problems are caused by not following the recipe, though security is one of the considerations when deciding whether to store the data in Access or in a client/server RDBMS.

> 3. Your environment is pure Microsoft.

Samba on *IX seems to work well enough.

> 4. You don't have a background in stable computing where being BSOD'd drives
> your blood pressure up.

I haven't had much trouble lately, but then, I've been able to avoid the no-name plain-white-box clone-of-a-clone-of-a-clone hardware, and non-ECC RAM is non-welcome around here. Hardware compatibility lists aren't just for the "big boys" anymore.

> When I first consulted for Boeing I was in a department whose purpose was
> moving applications built in Access to Oracle because they had been developed
> by people who made invalid assumptions related to the above items.

Or was it because Boeing muckety-mucks had been on a golfing junket with their friendly local Oracle salesman?

> To me Access is one step above 3x5 cards. The cost of a database application
> is never in the software purchased from the vendor. It is in the design,
> implementation, testing, and long-term maintenance. Within three years your
> Access app will be worthless. The Oracle app will still be as stable as a
> rock and capable of being migrated to the latest version of the RDBMS in a
> matter of minutes.

Sound design principles don't apply solely to Oracle schemas, you know. A fool with a tool is simply a more dangerous fool, another principle which applies equally well to both Oracle and Access, right along with every other product out there.

--
Joe Foster <mailto:jfoster@ricochet.net>    On the cans? <http://www.xenu.net/>
WARNING: I cannot be held responsible for the above        They're   coming  to
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