Access - Devastation

[Ari]

Here's a quick survey of subscribers on my website from 2017 to 2022.

Total subscribers in the period: 2274

10 to 24 years: 60
25 to 30 years: 180
31 to 40 years: 574
41 to 50 years: 703
51 to 99 years: 757

5 years and only 60 subscribers, under 25 years.

Have you noticed that most of the participants of this topic are over 50 years old?

 

[CJ_London]

just means they haven't discovered the benefits of Access

 

[KitaYama]

This requires, a database, browser, apache, php, html, CSS, javascript, etc. Takes a bit of work to integrate these applications, but the results are well worth it. One item of good news, this alternative approach to MS Access is $$$ free.

@Steve R. I can't believe you're comparing PHP with MySQL on an apachee with Access.
Just let me ask you a question.

With above circumstances, Can you bound a form on a web page to a recordset or a table or a query?

 

[isladogs]

Here's a quick survey of subscribers on my website from 2017 to 2022.

Total subscribers in the period: 2274

10 to 24 years: 60
25 to 30 years: 180
31 to 40 years: 574
41 to 50 years: 703
51 to 99 years: 757

5 years and only 60 subscribers, under 25 years.

Have you noticed that most of the participants of this topic are over 50 years old?

Pity you didn't split the over 50s by age decade also. I wonder how many are 90+.

 

[Pat Hartman]

@Ari If you don't like Access or don't think it is a worthwhile tool, perhaps you should move on People who think they are working with inferior tools are always unhappy.

I've been a huge Access fan since I discovered it in the early 90's when I did a project using it for Reader's Digest. The 25 years before that and the 10 years after when I was working with both platforms, I worked for large clients. Boeing, American Express, Reader's Digest, Pratt & Whitney, Sikorsky, The Hartford Insurance Group, Travelers, several regional banks and state governments as well as the government of Kuwait. those are only some my big clients. In all those years of managing multi-million dollar projects around the country and the world, not a single one of them, in retrospect, was too much for Access to handle even with their millions of rows of data and nightly batch processing. The problem would come down to the scale of the project and the number of concurrent developers needed. If my team was 20 people to develop with COBOL and DB2, I could have easily accomplished the same thing with a team of good Access developers of half the size and take half the time. So, I could bring in a 4 million dollar project for 1 million. Unfortunately, Access, because of its integration with Jet/ACE and dependence on it as the bucket that holds all objects means you can't work effectively with multiple developers. Certainly not a large team.

The BEST development tool is the one that can support providing the necessary solution with the fewest resources, least time, and least money. Many companies still believe that is true. If only we could convince Microsoft also that it was true so they could market it appropriately, we would have such a resurgence of Access development, it would bring people out of retirement.

The thing that has always constrained Access was Jet and ACE. I don't know what Access would be without this symbiotic relationship. The relationship is symbiotic because both products need each other. Access needs Jet/ACE to hold its application objects although not its application data and Jet/ACE need Access to provide a GUI FE to support developing a database.

So, Access without Jet/ACE would be more like developing with VBA or C or some other non-net only language. That brings us into the realm of a "real" development environment with all that goes along with that. Maybe the dependence on Jet/ACE isn't so bad at all

 

[Steve R.]

@Steve R. I can't believe you're comparing PHP with MySQL on an apachee with Access.
Just let me ask you a question.

With above circumstances, Can you bound a form on a web page to a recordset or a table or a query?

H'mmm. In a sense this is a case of apples and oranges.

• Apache is is the server that allows the database to be accessed by any computer on the local LAN.
• In my case, I use MariaDB (a MySQL fork). That is where the data is actually stored.
• PHP is used to interrogate the database (on the server). I suppose you can say that PHP creates a faux rerecord set through issuing an SQL statement. PHP reads and writes to the database. It also allows scrolling.
• The form, which is viewed through a browser, is visually created through HTML, and CSS.

 

[Ari]

@Ari If you don't like Access or don't think it is a worthwhile tool, perhaps you should move on People who think they are working with inferior tools are always unhappy.

Pat Hartman, I think you're misjudging me. We know very well the potential of Ms Access, and there is no dispute about it. What I am bringing here are numbers, which show a trend towards the distance of young people. I posted a link to a forum on electronics, wanting to show the degree of dissatisfaction people have with Microsoft.

Looking on the optimistic side, the trend shows that there will be a shortage of VBA programmers and this could bring better job opportunities and appreciation.

 

[Ari]

Pity you didn't split the over 50s by age decade also. I wonder how many are 90+.

Total subscribers in the period: 2274

14 to 24 years: 60
25 to 30 years: 180
31 to 40 years: 574
41 to 50 years: 703
51 to 60 years: 495
61 to 70 years: 229
71 to 80 years: 31
81 to 88 years: 2

 

[KitaYama]

Well, one can assemble an Access equivalent by installing a variety of applications. This requires, a database, browser, apache, php, html, CSS, javascript, etc.

H'mmm. In a sense this is a case of apples and oranges.

I know what they are. I've spent more than half of my life on web languages, building shopping sites.
It's you who are asking us to assemble them for an Access equivalent. I just wanted to tell they will never have the possibilities Access gives you.

 

[isladogs]

Total subscribers in the period: 2274

14 to 24 years: 60
25 to 30 years: 180
31 to 40 years: 574
41 to 50 years: 703
51 to 60 years: 495
61 to 70 years: 229
71 to 80 years: 31
81 to 88 years: 2

Thanks
Anyway, your statement that most of your subscribers are over 50 is completely incorrect

14-50: TOTAL = 1517 = 66.7%
51+ : TOTAL = 757 = 33.3%

Ot were you referring to the age profile of this thread? If so, how do you know?

 

[Steve R.]

I know what they are. I've spend more than half of my life on web languages, building shopping sites.
It's you who are asking us to assemble them for an Access equivalent. I just wanted to tell they will never have the possibilities Access gives you.

Respectfully disagree.

 

[KitaYama]

@Ari with all respects, you can't come to a conclusion with those numbers.
1- You can't give a statistical conclusion with only 2 or 3 thousands members of only one site. You need more sample data to give a statistical result.
2- When you get old, you get retired and you have plenty free time in your hand. After you do all you have to do, there's still a lot of remaining time. What you do? Join different on line communities. It's not only Access communities with high count of older average members. In my profession, most of the sites I visit have the same result. Most members are over 65. Does it mean young generation stay away from manufacturing design engineering? I'm employed in a company with less than 200 employee and 5 designers. The only over 55 years old is me, the other 4 are under 35. And none of them use on line forums.

They learn quickly and simply prefer to put their free time on social media, rather than joining a forum.

My 2 ¢

 

[isladogs]

New article by Michael Aldridge:

Access Fix Now Available for VBA Security Patch Issue

Access Fix Now Available for VBA Security Patch Issue

techcommunity.microsoft.com

Communication from the Access team is definitely improving even if its being forced on them by the endless series of bugs we now see each month. Perhaps a stronger word than 'unfortunate' would have been better!

 

[jdraw]

List of synonyms of unfortunate. Any of which may have better described what many businesses and IT support felt on startup after the update.

Unfortunate
meaning:
bringing about ruin or misfortune
sample usage:
an unfortunate chain of events destroyed the business

Synonyms for unfortunate

calamitous, cataclysmal (or cataclysmic), catastrophic, damning, destructive, disastrous, fatal, fateful, ruinous

Words Related to unfortunate

apocalyptic (also apocalyptical)

hapless, ill-fated, ill-starred, luckless

adverse, baleful, baneful, damaging, deleterious, detrimental, evil, harmful, hurtful, ill, injurious, noxious, pernicious, prejudicial

 

[canyonraven]

I work in large organization where data is handled in small teams. There is definitely an age cohort associated with Access with most of the VBA developers being 50 and older. The younger developers continue to use SQL and relational databases but there is a trend towards Python and R and automation of data capture with off-the-shelf data loggers. Personally I don't have any problem with this. MS Access has been incredibly useful and, when I started developing it was just a question of which OOP language you were going to use. This technology is still very useful, but it's clear that eventually there will be a scarcity of developers to support it.

 

[canyonraven]

I work in large organization where data is handled in small teams. There is definitely an age cohort associated with Access with most of the VBA developers being 50 and older. The younger developers continue to use SQL and relational databases but there is a trend towards Python and R and automation of data capture with off-the-shelf data loggers. Personally I don't have any problem with this. MS Access has been incredibly useful and, when I started developing it was just a question of which OOP language you were going to use. This technology is still very useful, but it's clear that eventually there will be a scarcity of developers to support it.

By "eventually", I mean a decade or so. It's still a very, very long time as a software product.

 

[Pat Hartman]

The younger developers continue to use SQL and relational databases

It is statements like that which turn people away from Access who might otherwise consider it. The implication of that statement is that Access does not use SQL and other relational databases when we know it does. Access uses any RDBMS on the market that supports ODBC.

 

[canyonraven]

I certainly didn't mean to imply that MS Access doesn't use SQL.

 

[canyonraven]

VBA is not a big draw to new coders because Microsoft is not investing in it.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

This reminds me of the path of my career. Bear with me while I go philosophical for a moment.

Back in the 1970s, I specialized in Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) machines. My two strongest platforms were the PDP-11 (16-bit micro) and VAX 11/780 (32-bit super-mini with 64-bit data ability). I started with a DEC reseller and OEM because we made our own telemetry cards for a set of industrial products with a centralized control computer.

I was a device-driver specialist then. Time passed and I got the Navy contractor job on two hulking VAXen with 4-digit model numbers. They cranked at blazing speed. Then the CISC market faded in deference to RISC machines - but VMS was ported to the COMPAQ 64-bit Alphas because DEC got bought out by COMPAQ. Again, time passed and HP bought out COMPAQ but they ported VMS to various 64-bit machines including one IBM chip and some Intel chips, both brands using the "Longhorn" series, the IA64 chips - which were absolute beasts. Gotta say that with an 8-processor Itanium, I NEVER experienced an execution backlog. But by then, monster centralized mainframes were losing popularity to web-based databases. My monster Itaniums were eventually retired - and I retired before they did. But it was a good ride while it lasted. Oh, there are still many OpenVMS sites around the world. I hear they were really popular in the Netherlands. But their use in the USA started to fade.

This parallels the directions I have seen for Access. Don't get me wrong, I think Access was and still is a great tool with a lot of capability. But newer and more modern tools will eventually take over. Access hasn't faded yet and probably won't - because as noted, it has no current equal for in-house small DBs (using JET/ACE backends) or larger DBs (using active SQL backends). Access is doomed to fade as economic forces bring about newer and far better tools with real web abilities. The fact that right now you would have to cobble together a lot of disparate parts, as noted by Steve R., just means that there is a demand - and where there is a demand, some entrepreneur will eventually offer a product. Eventually, Access will fade into a state of relative obscurity, never really going away - but it will lose market share. As Chaucer once said (brought to modern idiom) "All things must end." (Comes from his poem “Troilus and Criseyde”.)

Take a look at languages like ALGOL and FORTRAN, which have been supplanted by more "procedurally oriented" languages such as PASCAL, ADA, PL/1, C variants, and we can't forget COBOL. None of the languages have gone away. They just aren't that commonly used any more. I mourn their fateful progression into history and celebrate them for the proud attempt they were to finally come up with the "perfect" programming language. Each one close, none of them actually on target. Their foibles and failures HAVE to exist if you believe in Goedel's Completeness Theorem - that no language can be both complete and correct at the same time.

So each generation looks for a different facet of perfection as THEY see it. But I'm like the old guy on the street corner contentedly strumming a single chord on the guitar. People come up to me and say, "Hey, there, buddy. Everybody else changes chords now and then. Why don't you?" To which I answer, "They are lookin' for the right chord. I've found it."