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Fuck all this pointless noise, verbose analysis, LLMs and other associated crap. Just someone give me MS Access for the web with an SSO module and let me drive
by dgxyz 9mo ago
Fuck all this pointless noise, verbose analysis, LLMs and other associated crap.
Just someone give me MS Access for the web with an SSO module and let me drive it.
That'd cover 99% of LOB app needs and allow me to actually get shit done without tools that dissolve in my hands or require hordes of engineers to keep running or have to negotiate with a bullshit generator to puke out tens of thousands of lines of unmaintainable javascript crap.
We have achieved nothing in the last 25 years if we can't do that. Everyone who entered the industry since about 2005 appears to be completely braindead on how damn easy it was to get stuff actually done back then.
- 3acctforcom 9mo agoCome to the dark side my friend. Embrace Oracle Apex.
- bronco21016 9mo agoHave you tried Airtable or the likes?
- dgxyz 9mo agoI've seen it yes. It's not even close to what LOB apps need in reality.
- normanvalentine 9mo agoI'll admit to having joined the industry after 2005. Can you say more about how easy it was to get stuff done back then? What was actually easier? Was Access just good and you didn't need to deal with building web apps?
- cheschire 9mo agoAccess sucked. It didn’t scale. You could have a small team use one database just fine, but wiring it up to the other access databases was a nightmare. Version control was practically non-existent. Corrupt databases were routine. You would often have the “expert” that created the highly specific configuration depart the organization before anyone realized they were the only ones that held knowledge of who and what was connected to it. And don’t even get me started on the awful recorded macro code or insecure VBA. Excel is arguably worse, if only because it was more accessible for less patient people. But at least Excel doesn’t offer you an entire armory of footguns at quite the same scale as Access did.
- dgxyz 9mo agoIt did scale fine. We pointed it at SQL Server. Version control was in issue yes but you didn't really need it because ONE PERSON could literally do all the engineering work. You just copied the MDB file and suffixed it with the date. In reality, corrupt databases were a non-issue if you didn't shove MDBs on a network share and VBA was not a security risk here because the distribution of the MDBs was controlled.
- cheschire 9mo agoWhat you just described is a sample size of one. I spent ten years supporting a 30k+ person company and never saw Access used in reasonable ways. It was always on a network share, data always stored in the local file instead of SQL, “engineering” done entirely by a power user that got a book on MS Access at the bookstore instead of by anyone with actual engineering experience. There’s a reason people in IT hate Access. It’s not because the technology. It’s because of what organizational bad habits the technology enabled.
- dgxyz 9mo agoSample size is irrelevant. The problem is bad people, not bad software. It ran a 50 seat ERP system that managed over 1000 suppliers and 500 customers, did all invoicing, inventory/stock management, logistics and financials. In the hands of clue that is. They did replace it with SAP eventually but this was at a 15x per seat cost multiplication. There is still is a lot of stuff hiding out there that works like that which is used daily and has few issues. You just don't hear about it because the people building and operating it really don't give a crap and have no enthusiasm - it's a tool to do a job. As it should be.
- cheschire 9mo agoSample size is irrelevant to you, the sample size.
- csomar 9mo agoI think it's just nostalgia for a simpler, less complicated past. We do lots of things today that would've been impossible with Access and that we now take for granted. For example, most people today expect to access their system from anywhere via the internet; pulling up a specific invoice on their phone, for instance. That just wasn't possible with Access 2000. And if you tried building a web-accessible system on top of its database, you'd essentially be starting from scratch anyway. The reality is that the web is complicated because we want endless possibilities while staying fully connected.
- dgxyz 9mo agoBest thing is have a look at a short tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubmwp8kbfPc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubmwp8kbfPc It has problems, as the other reply suggests, but most of those are easily surmountable in 2026.
- pphysch 9mo ago> MS Access for the web with an SSO This is essentially Rails and Django and so on
- dgxyz 9mo agoThat's not even remotely close to the idea. It's conceptually entirely different. I'll note that Access existed in a completely usable form before the www even existed.
- pphysch 9mo agoHow is it conceptually different? RDBMS ORM-based web frameworks (with built-in Admin GUIs) ate the web-oriented crowd, and the rest are happy managing their data in Excel. That doesn't leave much room for MS Access.
- fock 9mo agolook at grist! I played around with it and it seemed quite awesome.
- dgxyz 9mo agoNot even remotely near Access 2.0 from 1994.
- sien 9mo agoYeah. Absolutely. Access and Visual Basic was the one low code platform that really worked. The Apache foundation or someone ought to target that as a proper Open Source setup.
- NetMageSCW 9mo agoSomeone upstream said Mendix is what you are looking for? (Know Access pretty well, don’t know a thing about Mendix.)