Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

'just in case there is data corruption'

In my experience that was guaranteed if any of the clients connected other than by ethernet.

I've not done it but I understand that it's not difficult to have an Access front end for a SQL Server backend rather than the default mdb or accdb backend.

All being Microsoft products the migration to SQL server is easy as I understand it.

I find it hard to understand why large companies would not adopt this approach.



Access files are definitely super-fragile. That's not isolated to Access, though. Any time a file sharing protocol is used to host a database-- particularly with multi-user locking semantics-- I get the willies.

I've done more "development" of Access-based applications over the years than I'd care to admit and, as a menu-driven front end for interaction with a client/server RDBMS (SQL Server, Postgres, etc) I think it's good cheap solution. Visual BASIC for Applications (VBA) can even do some powerful (and arguably ill-advised) stuff like directly calling Win32 APIs. It's an awesome prototyping tool in my experience.

The typical Access solution I see in large corporate environments is something knocked-together by non-IT people. Once it gets to the level of needing to be upsized to a client/server RDBMS back-end the "real" IT department comes in and demands a purpose-built solution. Usually bureaucracy, disdain for Access, licensing costs for the client/server RDMS, taking away file servers, etc, end up killing it.


Application Packaging was in my past; can confirm the disdain for Access. There was a definite gap in IT Support though.

Upon upgrading from Windows XP, Access was removed from the environment AND existing access databases were shoved into a database farm.

But any new business needs for something similar IE "Hey IT, we want a little app just to store XYZ business info" fell on deaf ears - the response was always "Hire IT Company to build it and hand it over." which of course would cost tens of thousands rather than a handful and thus priced it out of existence.

Which meant of course the business people started finding solutions OUTSIDE of IT Support purview....




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: