Hah! Don't discount it that quickly - MS Access can be surprisingly useful, particularly for RAD work at a large company where you need to push stuff out to a b

Hah! Don't discount it that quickly - MS Access can be surprisingly useful, particularly for RAD work at a large company where you need to push stuff out to a bunch of MS Office users. I've delivered a bunch of "light" Access/VBA applications to support business initiatives (cranked out in under a week or two) which probably account for over 80% of the value created by my hands on technical work (several of which provided the "chassis" for multi-million dollar performance improvement programs). Access plays well with everyone (including Oracle, the MS Office family, and Sharepoint), can be heavily extended if you know VBA and are willing to hack a bit, and can often be handed off to a non-technical person for support. The trick is to try to use the same coding/design standards that you would use in a real langauge - the internal parts of my Access/VBA work is influenced by Python and C++. And from a consulting perspective, it has the advantage of being aligned with what 90% of your Fortune 500 end-users are familar with (MS Office)... simpler handoffs. That being said...not my first choice for after hours work (do a lot of MySQL, looking to step up to Postgres). Incidently (for the other thread) - one really nice thing about oracle is their statistical analysis functions - very nice set of tools, co-located with your data, and can be accessed through SQL. Only free solution I've seen that is competitive in terms of functionality is Postgres...