Future of Access

[The_Doc_Man]

In my early days as a Navy Contractor (and with a now-defunct SQL engine as the back-end), we used Crystal Reports regularly.

 

[Pat Hartman]

I remember FOCUS (scary isn't it) as well as Crystal Reports.

Access reports are generally superior and easier to build plus they are integrated with Access. I think Crystal had some good features though that never made it into Access.

It’s weird because I never hear this kind of criticism with other similar products. There’s always this cloud hanging over Access sometimes it’s the community, other times it’s the perceived lack of interest from the Microsoft Access team. It’s all very confusing.

This is actually due to internal MS politics. Most of the rumors of Access' demise can be traced back to the SQL Server team. They resurface every time certain types of changes are made to Access. One of the problems revolves around Jet. Jet was the original database engine that shipped with Access. It is the engine associated with the .mdb format. This was a separate product and was actually used internally by Windows to hold certain types of data so the Jet engine was normally installed with Windows. It wasn't until Access 2.1 ~ 1993 that Jet was actually bundled with Access. Jet was under the control of the SQL Server team so in their mind it was a competitor to SQL Server because it was a database engine. Since Jet was intended for local use and small databases, it's engine worked very differently from that of SQL Server and so to their mind was inferior. And, they were correct to a point. Although the "inferiority" had nothing whatso ever to do with Access the RAD tool. It was all related to the lack of security of the Jet engine. But that's where all the bad press originates. The SQL Server team always thought of Jet as a competitor to SQL Server but no where near as good and that is what they told everybody.

When MS was working on O2007, they spent a ton of money on "upgrading" (in quotes because not all changes were an upgrade. Random excellent features bought the dust at this point in time) MS wanted Access to have a better integration with SharePoint so Access could build forms that ran on SharePoint but to do that, they needed to change Jet to include the necessary abomination data types. To accomplish this, they took the Jet code base and made it into ACE (.accdb format) and now the Access team owns ACE rather than the SQL Server team so that Access is better placed to modify how the database engine works if they need to. This particular event set off a whole new round of ACCESS IS DEAD rumors and that was totally because the SQL Server team though Jet was Access and Jet was being replaced by ACE and so Access was DEAD. As it happens, I went to Redmond in 2006 to a meeting where some Access users were shown the beta version of A2007. It was clear that whether we liked what we saw or not, MS had spent a ton of money on the changes. The month after I came back from Redmond, I went to a SQL Server event held at the MS office in Manhattan where I met the branch manager who was slightly tipsy and was telling me how Access was dead. He had no idea who I was so I told him where I'd been a few weeks earlier and how Access was very much alive and well. He didn't believe me. He KNEW Access was dead. There was no talking to the man. But, he was tipsy so I didn't try very hard.

 

[BlueSpruce]

33 years later, Access is still alive and kicking!.. This defies MS logic. I think that Microsoft is just not making the kind of money they'd like to make from the millions of Access applications out there. Throughout the years, Microsoft has tried to persuade migration to DotNet, Access Web Apps which I actually liked and miss, and now PowerApps. However, I am concerned that MS is going to restrict VBA's ability to interact with the Windows Filesystem because of security concerns. They already started with removing Outlook automation.