Future of Access

Very interesting conversation.

A question that came up, how did the slant against Access take root in corporate IT departments, of course has several sides to it. One I think was mentioned, that IT folk aren't experienced with Access, never understand it's strengths, but do trip over it's weaknesses; and of course Access is not great for collaboarative development. But another reason is kind of paradoxical. There was a massive proliferation of small to medium sized Access projects in organizations precisely because they were so much easier and quicker to build, and typically didn't cost and arm and a leg.

Later edit: and the multiplicity of access dbs were unmanaged, often out of date, often had taps into data sources that with various permissions that could cause issues, and were often abandoned or hard to determine if they were still relevant or not. From that perspective, it's easy to see why many in IT would wish Access had never been introduced to their org.
 
Last edited:
Later edit: and the multiplicity of access dbs were unmanaged, often out of date, often had taps into data sources that with various permissions that could cause issues, and were often abandoned or hard to determine if they were still relevant or not. From that perspective, it's easy to see why many in IT would wish Access had never been introduced to their org.
IT also doesn't understand that it is in their best interest to provide in-house Access development support to help to ensure that users who attempt to go it alone create something sort of sound instead of crap.
So why did IT's ignore those Access apps when they could've managed them from the beginning, or at least enforced a policy? But wait a minute, all enterprise editions of Office included Access. So why single out Access when Excel also has hooks into corporate data sources, and is actually less secure than Access? Have IT's been pressuring MS to no longer include Access in M365 Enterprise editions?

BTW, this is the first thread I posted when I joined AWF. I feel it's an important topic to discuss. How can we influence Microsoft regarding the Future of Access? Can we make a difference?
 
Last edited:
They're not trained that way. They tend to go top down - "We're an Oracle shop." The end users that we often deal with do not seem to be who they work for; they work for whomever is higher up in IT. The higher ups in IT are even more remote from the end users.

Meanwhile the poor end users that actually get the work done for the org are being barraged by tasks and projects and often a sense that their data operations could be handled a lot better. Knowing that IT doesn't care that much, is overloaded, and slow, they often resorted to creating their own Access db, then when it gets too complex, they hire us; or they hire us from day one, often slipping in the engagement under the radar.

At least that's how it was in the 90s until maybe this decade. I'm not sure that this scenario is so common now. But it did result in hundreds of mystery databases scattered all over the place that no one who was supposed to be in charge of the data knew about. Yeah so they didn't like that.

Of course it could have made a lot of sense to recognize the reality (that end users were desperate enough to undertake stealth databases) and either helped out or facilitated or something. But probably the most common reaction was the urge to shut them down. Since they often couldn't (line of business dbs are useful!), it became a sore spot.

You'd think that a team (the company's inmates) could do better than that. But it's kind of like one of the other conundrums we see. IT folk tend to think they are way smarter than the end users (present company excluded), and often their bosses as well; but to many of the folks outside of IT, IT barely registers, and the help they provide seems more like finger in the dike than making things a lot better. I am sure that many/most/all of the people here have high regard for end users, but not everyone in IT or management does. Maybe that too is a part of why Access can be looked down on - anyone with interest can build something useful. Doesn't sound very elite!
 
So why single out Access

Luke chung spoke about this when he visited the UK the Microsoft campus in reading Berkshire...

I went up to see him present..

I mentioned it in this thread here:-


What I didn't mention was that one of the reasons Luke mentioned that organizations do not like Microsoft Access is because most people can use it and create something that works... Unfortunately most people create something that is an abomination that works for a time and then stops... Then they take it to the server team --- I want it sorted out! This really pisses the server team off so instead of learning how to use access or get someone like one of us in that knows how to use access they scupper it every way they can... So it's politics! The problem for the server team is often the person creating the wayward database is the boss himself, so there's a sort of tolerance, tolerances the wrong word but you get my drift!

I forgot to mention this was about 20 years ago!
 
Last edited:
So why single out Access?
Is it because Excel is so overwhelmingly popular, and data stored in corporate db's cannot be updated with Excel? I have seen many businesses and corporate departments running their operations with Excel, but God forbid they create siloed db's with Access!
 
BlueSpruce that's a good question. I would guess that it's because probably the majority of business users natively use Excel for tasks, they have to to crunch numbers, just like they have to use Word for documents. But Access is not in the same category - with it you can create applications that rival turnkey solutions. IT might be called in to manage someone's Excel files when they leave for another company, but just as likely some peer of the now gone employee takes over the files. You'd think that an employee would use or port to Access because it's more capable than Excel. By the same token, because Access is more complex, it'd be harder to wade in to if you had to take it over, esp if you're an IT person that has mild or no exposure to Access. Then factor in what Uncle Gizmo just said, that most home grown applications like these are a big mess inside. Not a lot of fun for IT.

The greatest mystery of all is why Microsoft, with all of it's resources, has not been able to come up with something that is just a great as Access is, that was built from the ground up to be acceptable to IT, hopefully anticipating a migration path between Access and that product. The potential for such a product would be colossal. Maybe Lightswitch could have been that, but they let it go so easily.
 
The greatest mystery of all is why Microsoft, with all of it's resources, has not been able to come up with something that is just a great as Access is, that was built from the ground up to be acceptable to IT...
Microsoft's answer to that is DotNet, and IT's embraced it. For years, MS has been preaching migration from Access to DotNet with SQL Server. They even created a DotNet vba_like language called vb.net, but not many developers use it anymore and MS seems like they want to deprecate it.
 
But .net is massively more complex than Access. Webforms tried to be like vb6/Access, not sure if those are considered bound controls. But webforms had a lot of negtives and is a backwatered framework at this point.

A corporate worker could dig in to a book or two and write a line of business application (which probably needed to be refactored by someone that was more experienced). That didn't happen much with .net - too steep of a climb.
 
Webforms tried to be like vb6/Access, not sure if those are considered bound controls...
Webforms operate via stateless unbound http requests.

I know some Access developers, like Albert Kallal and Jack Leach, who transitioned from Access to DotNet, but as you said, the learning curve is steep. I participated in a DotNet interop project where an Access FE was interfaced with QuickBooks Online.
 
The greatest mystery of all is why Microsoft, with all of it's resources, has not been able to come up with something that is just a great as Access is, that was built from the ground up to be acceptable to IT, hopefully anticipating a migration path between Access and that product. The potential for such a product would be colossal. Maybe Lightswitch could have been that, but they let it go so easily.
Corporations evolve. They start off as aggressive entrepreneurial innovative companies, but as time progresses the innovators leave and the corporations become ruled by lawyers and accountants. Look at Boeing's space program versus Musk's space program.

Because my memory is imperfect, I leaned on ChatGPT to provide the following answer:
That idea is most commonly associated with Murray Rothbard, an American economist and political theorist of the Austrian School and a major figure in libertarian thought.

Rothbard argued that large corporations—especially those deeply connected to regulation, subsidies, or government contracts—effectively become extensions of the state. In his view, the line between big business and government is often blurred, forming what he called a “corporate state” or “state capitalism.” He suggested that these corporations derive their power not from free markets but from their relationship with government, making them functionally indistinguishable from it.
For Microsoft, MS Access is probably nothing more than a "cash cow". Something that still provides revenue, but is no longer relevant to their corporate objectives. Consequently they don't want to invest in it.
 
The biggest problem with Access is not actually scalability, that can easily be handled by SQL Server or other RDBMS but is its clumsiness as a multi-developer platform to support parallel development by multiple developers at one time because it uses a single container for all objects.

An astute observation, Pat. Not unique, not the first time it has been said on the forum, but absolutely on point. I had that issue ten years ago with my big Navy security status tracker app.
 
What is this obsession with running in a browser? You don't need Access to run in a browser. You only need Access to be able to effectively connect to data sources across a WAN the same way that web apps do. Access is perfectly capable of doing this NOW. The issue is the connection is so slow it is like watching paint dry.

WHY do you think people should be willing to give up all the things that Access does and which a web app can never do? What is wrong with simply fixing the ONE limitation Access has and that is the speed of the connection to the remote database? I'm not saying this is a trivial problem to solve but in the greater scheme of things it is a pretty focused task and so maybe someone can figure out how to do it.

Yes, distribution of updates is easier with a browser but somehow those of us who create professional level Access apps manage to make this happen without disruption for our clients.

Agreed, forget about running Access in a browser. We can do that right now with RD.
Does anyone remember the Access User Voice request about making Access a better ODBC client?

AUV.PNG
 
Last edited:
And the same is true for some of the first iterations of programming like cobal... I understand many bank applications are built on incredibly antiquated software..,..
They are! I've worked for 2 major fortune 500 banks and they have many old parts of them that desperately need to be reimagined.
Same is true (even more so maybe) for gov entities. Worked for a state Taxing authority and they had 2 systems where "one guy" in the whole organization knew how to edit or maintain it. Boy, did he stand up straight when he walked. You couldn't tell him anything LOL because upon his whim the Arizona Dept of Revenue exists! Really incredibly awful risky stuff, but they do it
 
The greatest mystery of all is why Microsoft, with all of it's resources, has not been able to come up with something that is just a great as Access is, that was built from the ground up to be acceptable to IT,
The problem is more that Access is just too good at what it does. It is too easy for non-programmers to "discover" forms and build tables. They generally do a very poor job because they have no concept of good design or database normalization but, they frequently manage to get something just workable enough to get by until the original developer leaves and they want some improvement and so they go to IT who gasps at the mess they find and then proceeds to badmouth Access to whoever will listen. Never even considering how the situation got to this point. These bad databases are ALWAYS the fault of Access and never the fault of IT for non support of the user community who can't wait 3 years to get a solution they need today to take advantage of some business opportunity.
Does anyone remember the Access User Voice request about making Access a better ODBC client?
This particular request - to install SQL Server with Access actually happened. I think it was for A2002 or A2003. Access automatically installed a local desktop version of SQL Server. It also resulted in one of the SQL Server team's many campaigns to tell the world that "Access is dead". Because, remember, they think of Access as Jet (at that time) and there's lots wrong with Jet but they also considered Jet a competitor and therefore a threat to SQL Server. They never understood that they should think of Access - the RAD tool - as a compliment and an aid in development.
 
This particular request - to install SQL Server with Access actually happened. I think it was for A2002 or A2003. Access automatically installed a local desktop version of SQL Server.
You must be referring to SQL Server Compact 4.0. That's when we were able to create OLEDB ADP's (Access Data Projects). I think it was around until A2013, when MS decided to deprecate it because very few developers were using it. MS deprecates anything that has low usage. They don't want to spend money on things that don't produce good revenue for them.

Like you said earlier, if only MS would make Access work better with remote databases. Inside politics is the obstacle for improving Access.
 
The biggest problem with Access is not actually scalability, that can easily be handled by SQL Server or other RDBMS but is its clumsiness as a multi-developer platform to support parallel development by multiple developers at one time because it uses a single container for all objects.

Going 3rd party with source control solves the multiple developers problem.

I have been using joyfullservice (Access add-in) combined with Tortoise Git (Window Add-in) and Git Hub. I can export changes form the FE then commit to Git Hub. Changes can be merged in Git Hub and then downloaded and with the add-in to build a new FE from that source.

All the files created by the addin are text with 2 file for each form/report. One for the form and a 2nd for the VBA code behind form.
 
Going 3rd party with source control solves the multiple developers problem.
Source control is only part of the problem. I don't know how this tool works, it's been years since I last tried a source control addin. At that time, the process was abysmally slow but more important was that you had to remember to "check out" BEFORE you started modifying an object. Modifying an object should have automatically initiated the "check out". If you don't "check out", your changes didn't get logged. I would hope that newer versions are better.

The real issue is that if Bob makes a bad change and checks it back in, I may not be able to work on my piece if Bob's change broke something I needed.

Working as a team requires a build manager and the build manager should be the only person who can check objects in and he has to thoroughly check them as well as all other objects before the new changes can be incorporated into the current build.

I've tried a few times to have other developers work on isolated objects and that can work but again, you need one person who incorporates changes made by any team member. That meant me in all the times I tried this method since who can afford an extra developer who just handle's the build?
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Back
Top Bottom