Re: MS Access usefulness and size restrictions

"Terry Foster" wrote

> I was referring to Dan's prediction that Access will be dead in three
> years. I believe that _new_ applications will not be developed using
> Jet in three years. Yes, older applications that were well developed
> will survive for much longer than that. But honestly, if someone were
> to ask you to develop a new application today, would you choose Access
> 2.0? With the release of Access XP I believe that Access will be
> around a long time, even if Jet is not.

AAMOF, no, I probably would not _choose_ to develop a new application in Access 2.0. However, I completed in January 2001 a newly-developed application in Access 2.0 -- it was "pro bono" work for the fellow who is keeping track of my high school classmates. For his employer (probably the major manufacturer of electrical generating and transmission equipment in the world), he has to have Access 2.0 on his computer because they have a currently-used Access 2.0 database vital to the business, and he didn't want to fill his hard drive with either a new retail version or a runtime. It is still a perfectly usable tool for developing, and the database works just-fine-thankee.

On the other hand, if I were asked to develop a new Access standalone or multiuser application, I would very likely choose Jet over MSDE. That development would cost the user less, and would scale better -- right up to the point where it was necessary to upsize to "real" SQL Server. And, as you point out, for many applications, that point never arrives. Frankly, I am not at all certain just what improvements or enhancements one would look for in the Jet world. Now, I might be more inclined to use the Developer/Desktop Edition of SQL Server (depending on the licensing provisions) because it _does_ come with SQL Server's excellent database creation, administration, and maintenance tools. But, it is, like MSDE, limited to 5 concurrent queries.

> Larry, you are one of the Access gurus I pay daily homage to as I work
> through my applications by utilizing your tips and tools. I was
> wondering if you are bothered by Access' identity crisis as much as I?
> Would you like to see it renamed to "VB for DB's"? Dan is just the
> latest of a long line of very well informed IT types that can't seem
> to seperate Access and Jet in their minds. Just curious.

No, I try to educate ignorant people when I can, and I try to correct their public misstatements about Access and Jet, but I don't know that I worry about an "identity crisis". I just accept that Access is, in Microsoft's eyes, primarily an end-user tool. Our developer efforts, no matter how many copies of Office _we_ believe have sold or kept sold for Microsoft, are really secondary to Microsoft. Whether that is right or not, given the proportions of the income due to each, it's certainly understandable.

Few of my clients are "IT types". Most of them are modest-sized businesses with a problem to solve, or a modest-sized organization in a huge business, with a problem to solve. They turn to me, or to the prime contractors for whom I work, when the IT department has deprecated them for needing something less than intergalactic in size or has proposed an intergalactic solution to a local or departmental problem (with corresponding intergalactic sized costs, even done internally). Surely, as some have proposed, the IT folks' solution would scale, if needed, to thousands of users, but, they'll ask, "How many people would really ever be involved in "our little corner of the business"? One such would be corporate real estate management -- in a corporation with tens, perhaps over a hundred, thousand employees -- our clients, at last report, had under two hundred users, some of those the real estate companies to whom they outsource certain services. An Access client to an Informix (their corporate standard product) database serves them admirably. Received on Wed Jun 13 2001 - 14:54:42 CDT