Future of Access (2 Viewers)

Also, and most importantly, the SQL Server team thinks of Access as a competitor because they don't even know what Access is and they think of it only in terms of Jet/ACE. So they don't even understand that many production Access applications rely on SQL Server or other RDBMS as their data store.
Do you really think they are so short-sighted and superficial?

Is that more your personal perception of the situation, or where do these statements originate from?
 
s that more your personal perception of the situation, or where do these statements originate from?
Your question is a bit snarky but it's actually from personal exchanges with the SQL Server regional manager and other reps at different client installations. They are all convinced that "Access" is only an inferior database engine. They KNOW this because they were responsible for Jet and that is one of the reasons that the Access team copied Jet and turned it into ACE for A2007. The Access team wanted to make changes to Jet to make it more compatible with SharePoint and the Jet team wasn't willing. Their advice to the clients is always to keep clear of "Access" because it is limited in size and lacking in security among other issues - all of which actually are "flaws" of Jet and have nothing to do with Access the RAD tool.
 
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MS may want Access users to migrate to PA, but if PA cannot fulfill all the needs their Access apps currently delivers. Therefore, users will continue using Access, as several have been doing for decades. MS is concerned about vba being a high security risk. That's why they wanted to retire desktop Outlook.
Fixed it for you.
 
Fixed it for you.
I said "if PA cannot fulfill..." because PA is young, Work In Progress, and may some day be as robust as Access, unless you know something we don't?

I remember you recently mimicking Access NW2 functionality with PA by making SQL Server Stored Procedures do the heavy lifting.

It's too bad we didn't have faith in Access Web Apps. By now it would've been robust and a viable Online Office tool.

How many years did it take for Access to become robust enough for developing complex applications?... Access 2.0 (1992) to Access 97?
 
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It's too bad we didn't have faith in Access Web Apps. By now it would've been robust and a viable Online Office tool.
At least three different times, MS has tried to webify Access and failed miserably. Why? They were solving the wrong problem. What they needed to do was to rework ODBC to be less chatty so that Access could interface easily with remote databases. The current way ODBC works on a LAN is fine because LAN's are very fast. This doesn't work over the internet because WAN connections are extremely slow when compared to LAN connections so although I can link an Access FE running on my c drive with a BE in Shanghai and it will work correctly, it is like watching paint dry.

Once MS put the FE on the web, they were not replicating Access because none of the interfaces worked like real Access and so no existing app could be converted, we would have had to rewrite the app completely using an inferior tool. THAT's why none of the three tries succeeded.
 
True, but without web connectivity Access became a relic frozen in time. It was no longer growing and expanding, hence SQL.
 
True, but without web connectivity Access became a relic frozen in time. It was no longer growing and expanding, hence SQL.
I've been creating applications with web connections for at least 15 years. Citrix and RDP both handle this task flawlessly and provide faster response time than even people using the app on the LAN get. For one of my apps, most of the users were in Connecticut at the head office and so used LAN connections. But we had another 20 users spread from San Francisco to Paris who used Citrix. Plus the local users could connect via Citrix if they were working from home. They reported that Citrix was at least as fast or faster than the LAN connection.

Lots of companies jumped onto Azure because of COVID and so were using that version of RD. So, their Access apps were simply reconfigured. No coding change required. They just worked;)

But I agree, it would be more straightforward if MS would optimize the ODBC connection to work well over a WAN. But, that ship has sailed. They've spent years of development time and a ton of money solving the wrong problem and it is unlikely that unless some rogue programmer sees a magic bullet and can easily modify ODBC, it will never be optimized.
 
I said "if PA cannot fulfill..." because PA is young, Work In Progress, and may some day be as robust as Access, unless you know something we don't?

I remember you recently mimicking Access NW2 functionality with PA by making SQL Server Stored Procedures do the heavy lifting.

It's too bad we didn't have faith in Access Web Apps. By now it would've been robust and a viable Online Office tool.

How many years did it take for Access to become robust enough for developing complex applications?... Access 2.0 (1992) to Access 97?
While I was being tongue in cheek, I'm pretty well convinced that PowerApps simply can't compete on an equal footing with Access. You note that I resorted to SQL Server Stored procedures to get the functionality needed to replicate Northwind Developer. There's a good reason for that. The basic logic required even for the basic inventory management model in NW Dev would be a hard slog in PowerApps.

Other functions, like basic reporting, simply don't exist in the PowerApps environment. One can convert screens (think Access forms as the closest comparison) to PDFs. That's not close to the power and flexibility of an Access report.

Don't get me wrong. I think PowerApps will eventually be quite useful, particularly in a hybrid application where it can handle remote and off-site data entry tasks on a smart device. I think the primary barrier to PowerApps is the licensing model, which is geared to large institutional environments, not the typical applications which are the bread-and-butter of Access.
 
At least three different times, MS has tried to webify Access and failed miserably. Why? They were solving the wrong problem. What they needed to do was to rework ODBC to be less chatty so that Access could interface easily with remote databases. The current way ODBC works on a LAN is fine because LAN's are very fast. This doesn't work over the internet because WAN connections are extremely slow when compared to LAN connections so although I can link an Access FE running on my c drive with a BE in Shanghai and it will work correctly, it is like watching paint dry.

Once MS put the FE on the web, they were not replicating Access because none of the interfaces worked like real Access and so no existing app could be converted, we would have had to rewrite the app completely using an inferior tool. THAT's why none of the three tries succeeded.
I think MS' goal with AWA was for it to be fully web based while mimicking how we currently create objects in Access. I remember tinkering with that functionality back in 2013-14. However, web apps are based on stateless unbound architecture, whereas Access VBA works with COM based bound objects. Two different worlds. There's several things in VBA that you can't do in JavaScript, like manipulate Windows Filesystem, e.g. FSO, run shell commands, automate other Office applications, etc. unless a web browser addon is used, but that was a security catastrophe when IE6 had that capability. MS wants Office to eventually be fully online. They did beef up ODBC for SQL Server and Azure to make it more resilient, but their strategy is to move away from desktop clients, such as Classic Outlook. You know MS is "Everything on the web".
 
While I was being tongue in cheek, I'm pretty well convinced that PowerApps simply can't compete on an equal footing with Access. You note that I resorted to SQL Server Stored procedures to get the functionality needed to replicate Northwind Developer. There's a good reason for that. The basic logic required even for the basic inventory management model in NW Dev would be a hard slog in PowerApps.

Other functions, like basic reporting, simply don't exist in the PowerApps environment. One can convert screens (think Access forms as the closest comparison) to PDFs. That's not close to the power and flexibility of an Access report.

Don't get me wrong. I think PowerApps will eventually be quite useful, particularly in a hybrid application where it can handle remote and off-site data entry tasks on a smart device. I think the primary barrier to PowerApps is the licensing model, which is geared to large institutional environments, not the typical applications which are the bread-and-butter of Access.
It currently seems like that now, however, since MS is fully invested into "Everything on the web", I would think in a couple of years PA will be more evolved, as long as MS sees corporate acceptance stats. Otherwise, PA will go away the same as AWA did a few years later. The consumer small biz space comprises the bulk of Access apps and MS needs to provide an affordable alternative to that space if they want users to migrate away from Desktop Access. Otherwise most will continue using what they have, and some will convert to web apps.

Is PowerBI still popular?

How many years did it take for Access to become robust enough for developing complex applications?... Access 2.0 (1992) to Access 97?
 
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Also, someone mentioned that power apps are "young", but they've been around now for 7 years...
Feels "young" to me because I haven't heard much about it until lately by @GPGeorge.
Perhaps it will get better traction if MS extends its functionality and makes it more affordable?
Did PowerBI and PowerQuery gain traction?
I'm expecting to see a PowerAI emerge.
 
bluespruce you almost have to be right about that. I don't pay attention to it regularly, and it's been a few years now. But I think if it was maturing into anything like the versatility of Access I'd/we'd have heard about it. From day one, Lightswitch was much closer to what an Access dev would look for, Beth Massi was a world class resource, but Microsoft folded it so casually.
 
bluespruce you almost have to be right about that. I don't pay attention to it regularly, and it's been a few years now. But I think if it was maturing into anything like the versatility of Access I'd/we'd have heard about it. From day one, Lightswitch was much closer to what an Access dev would look for, Beth Massi was a world class resource, but Microsoft folded it so casually.
IIRC, LightSwitch replaced SilverLight, and positioned it as an LOB RAD tool, but it didn't gain much traction, and MS replaced it with PowerApps. Is PA similar to LightSwitch?

I thought AWA's was a viable solution because it mimicked how we create tables, queries, forms, and reports in Desktop Access. It essentially had the same client UI. Access developers had high expectations that it would have a VBA_like language, but instead relied on event based Data Macros and was lacking the rich functionality available with VBA. So only a handful of Access developers adopted AWA and MS retired it in 2017.

So here we are again, for the 4th time, in the same dilema. First it was "Data Access Pages", then came "Access Web Databases", "Access Web Apps", and now "PowerApps". Next up, "PowerAI". . . "Hey AI, build me a web app with PowerApps that works just like Desktop Access NorthWinds2 application."
 
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IIRC, LightSwitch replaced SilverLight, and positioned it as an LOB RAD tool, but it didn't gain much traction, and MS replaced it with PowerApps. Is PA similar to LightSwitch?

I thought AWA's was a viable solution because it mimicked how we create tables, queries, forms, and reports in Desktop Access. It essentially had the same client UI. Access developers had high expectations that it would have a VBA_like language, but instead relied on event based Data Macros and was lacking the rich functionality available with VBA. So only a handful of Access developers adopted AWA and MS retired it in 2017.

So here we are again, for the 4th time, in the same dilema. First it was "Data Access Pages", then came "Access Web Databases", "Access Web Apps", and now "PowerApps". Next up, "PowerAI". . . "Hey AI, build me a web app with PowerApps that works just like Desktop Access NorthWinds2 application."
Your ending bit, not really re PA, because PA is not at all tied to Access. The other in your list were like that. Now Access has nothing to do with web depolyment.

I thing PA is much less like the Access model than Lightswitch was. Lightswitch was alive for about 5 years and evolved well in that time. As I understand it, Microsoft abandoned it not due to lack of popularity, but because some patent trolls sued them or threatened to around some part of the underlying tech. It still feels nuts that Microsoft let it dry up for that reason.
 
Your ending bit, not really re PA, because PA is not at all tied to Access. The other in your list were like that. Now Access has nothing to do with web depolyment.

I thing PA is much less like the Access model than Lightswitch was. Lightswitch was alive for about 5 years and evolved well in that time. As I understand it, Microsoft abandoned it not due to lack of popularity, but because some patent trolls sued them or threatened to around some part of the underlying tech. It still feels nuts that Microsoft let it dry up for that reason.
I put PA at the end because that's what MS wants Access users to migrate to, but I can tell that's not going to happen. MS needs to come up with a better tool that's affordable if they want the millions of Access users to convert. As @arnelgp says, "forever waiting, waiting for jellybean!".
 
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