our IT department has questioned our choice to use access as they say it is unstable. Has anyone got any thoughts on this.
PFFFFT ask ANY IT department to use Access for anything... this will be their answer. Instead you should hire 10 consultants for 6 months and develop something anything on oracle with a web front end and Datawarehouse costing 1 million instead of your db that you can develop for 1k and be happy :banghead:
1) Should be on your network, never externaly
2) Again typical IT retoric, unstable my arse.... Yes IF you have huge data running thru it exceeding the 2 gig limit per database, even then you can split the database and run 4 gig database.
The biggest issue IT has -usually- is that an access database is like an Excel sheet, created by non-it-people. Therefor they cant support it.
Then again they dont NEED to support it if you have an average user that knows his way around an excel sheet or access database.
Truth be told IMHO the average IT person is more afraid of Access than the actual concerns they voice.... worse yet the "biggest" issue of access usually is left out of the equation/discussion. Biggest gain of access, if you have someone that knows his way around it is you can develop a suitable solution on short order for low budget, which is the threat to IT because they need a conciderably larger budget and wont start thinking about delevering anything before they start with Functional and Technical specs, which wont start for 3 months anyways because of current reports.
Result in 6 months time you may get an estimate of when they expect to START the work (which may take another 6 months) and it will probably cost an arm and a leg because they did the analisys already.
** Yes I am speaking from experience but probably over stating some of the time/money requirements
*** Yes this is one of my "speaking chair" subjects
Depending on what you exactly want to do, if it is a simple list of 1000 consultants when started/ended/etc.... Perhaps even a simple excel sheet, oddly enough IT wont object to that