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Huh, similar story here. The nuclear department on my carrier needed to produce this monthly report for training hours that would take them a ton of manual effo

Huh, similar story here. The nuclear department on my carrier needed to produce this monthly report for training hours that would take them a ton of manual effort. There was no budget at all for any kind of automation but Access was on every machine. I know what I'm doing with databases. I never want to use Access if I don't have to. But it has the enviable property of "no server administration required" which meant that we could backup the DB to a shared drive and people after me could modify the thing without being a DBA. The amount of time that database saved really is mind-boggling.

mycall 7y ago
Fun getting everyone to close their MSAccess processes so you can do some changes to the MDB.
- kwhitefoot 7y ago
  I partially fixed that by splitting the mdb into a front end and a back end where the back end was only tables (no UI, no queries) and launching the front end mdb from a simple command script that copied it to the users tmp directory first. Then at least I could fix bugs in the UI and after a while that's where most of the bugs were.
  - onefuncman 7y ago
    huh, i just posted before i saw this comment that I never saw anyone plan out their access database like this, kudos
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
I wonder if sqlite could become this in the future.
- jdfellow 7y ago
  I wonder how much effort it would take to build a desktop application providing a similar user experience to Access, using SQLite.
  - krilly 7y ago
    Open/LibreOffice Base does have backends for MySQL and PostgreSQL already
    - yyx 7y ago
      I wish it was this easy to connect sqlite
    - projektfu 7y ago
      I tried open office base about 10 years ago and it was almost but not quite impossible to use. Has it improved?
  - _AzMoo 7y ago
    Why would you do that though? The underlying database technology is not really one of the problems access has.
    - allannienhuis 7y ago
      cross-platform might be one reason.
    - onefuncman 7y ago
      Sure it is ... the database underlying Access uses JetSQL which has its own fun syntactic quirks It's also very bad at concurrent users if you do go down the path of dropping it on a network share if it's a normalized schema, since there's no server to cache queries or do optimizations... for strictly data entry against a simple schema you can maybe push it to low 100s of users, but backing up / restoring / rolling out new versions is a nightmare when the frontend and backend are commingled like that. You can deploy different versions of .mdbs if you have an external backend, though I've never seen anyone do so with an Access database backing an Access "UI" project...
dlhavema 7y ago
My first real programming job was a summer project for a tutoring program at ASU where they managed their schedules in a shared access database. It got bad as it would get overwritten often. 10 students would show up with no tutor, or a tutor would sit and wiat for students who would never come cause they rescheduled. We copied the structure to SQL server, built some stored procs ( only allowed way to access the DB at the time ) and fronted it with a bunch of aspx pages. They loved it beyond my expectations. All of that was new learning as I had only ever done the LAMP stack at that time and this was all Microsoft stuff.

mycall 7y ago

Fun getting everyone to close their MSAccess processes so you can do some changes to the MDB.

kwhitefoot 7y ago
I partially fixed that by splitting the mdb into a front end and a back end where the back end was only tables (no UI, no queries) and launching the front end mdb from a simple command script that copied it to the users tmp directory first. Then at least I could fix bugs in the UI and after a while that's where most of the bugs were.
- onefuncman 7y ago
  huh, i just posted before i saw this comment that I never saw anyone plan out their access database like this, kudos
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]

WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago

I wonder if sqlite could become this in the future.

jdfellow 7y ago
I wonder how much effort it would take to build a desktop application providing a similar user experience to Access, using SQLite.
- krilly 7y ago
  Open/LibreOffice Base does have backends for MySQL and PostgreSQL already
  - yyx 7y ago
    I wish it was this easy to connect sqlite
  - projektfu 7y ago
    I tried open office base about 10 years ago and it was almost but not quite impossible to use. Has it improved?
- _AzMoo 7y ago
  Why would you do that though? The underlying database technology is not really one of the problems access has.
  - allannienhuis 7y ago
    cross-platform might be one reason.
  - onefuncman 7y ago
    Sure it is ... the database underlying Access uses JetSQL which has its own fun syntactic quirks It's also very bad at concurrent users if you do go down the path of dropping it on a network share if it's a normalized schema, since there's no server to cache queries or do optimizations... for strictly data entry against a simple schema you can maybe push it to low 100s of users, but backing up / restoring / rolling out new versions is a nightmare when the frontend and backend are commingled like that. You can deploy different versions of .mdbs if you have an external backend, though I've never seen anyone do so with an Access database backing an Access "UI" project...

dlhavema 7y ago

My first real programming job was a summer project for a tutoring program at ASU where they managed their schedules in a shared access database. It got bad as it would get overwritten often. 10 students would show up with no tutor, or a tutor would sit and wiat for students who would never come cause they rescheduled. We copied the structure to SQL server, built some stored procs ( only allowed way to access the DB at the time ) and fronted it with a bunch of aspx pages. They loved it beyond my expectations. All of that was new learning as I had only ever done the LAMP stack at that time and this was all Microsoft stuff.