Variables instead of controls?

[isladogs]

Also, if they say it's for a smaller company...

Isladogs owns a software development company whose primary offerings are Access databases that are used to run school districts.

True but the networked Access apps sold to schools use SQL Server BE for improved security and stability.
As a result, they work fine with 200+ simultaneous users.
Prior to upsizing the BE to SQL Server, the apps struggled with that many users and there were intermittent corruption issues.

 

[Frothingslosh]

SHHHHHH You're weakening my point!

And I actually kind of covered that with my reply directly before the one you quoted.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

As to the security aspects... Indeed, the U.S. Department of Defense can be a little ... how shall I say this... BLOODY FREAKIN' PARANOID about security. But if you (a) have your database behind a good firewall and (b) host that database BE on something with heftier security than Access (admittedly, not that hard), then the DoD will bless you. Or at least not curse you.

I had my own departmental databases to run that we used for monthly activity report generation having to do with security patching. Size-wise, that was 1400+ servers on 60+ projects with 30+ new patches per month applied by 20+ administrators and 10+ specialty engineers (for the VMWare systems). We figured we were tracking actions above 1/2 million events per year for which we had to keep records going back a minimum of 8 months on the low-end systems and a year for stuff that had higher security requirements. After that we could ARCHIVE - not delete - the records.

But sometimes I consulted on a BUMED (that's the U.S. Navy Bureau of Medicine) system used to track military people as they interacted with various and sundry military medical facilities. Wasn't my project but sometimes I had to step in. Needless to say, if that project was even ALLOWED to use Access, then the DoD thought that the Access FE and SQL Server BE were good enough for Privacy Act and HIPAA compliance.

 

[Frothingslosh]

the DoD thought that the Access FE and SQL Server BE were good enough for Privacy Act and HIPAA compliance.

Same with my insurance company. We even just use Windows Authentication rather than specific server logins.

And application whitelists....

 

[CJ_London]

Many of my clients are large multinationals. They don't use access for 'enterprise' scale systems, but they sure as heck do for all the things that those large systems either cannot do or the cost of implementing is considered too high.

 

[pbaldy]

Same here. We have several "enterprise" systems where the data is in SQL Server. I'm frequently asked if I can create reports, etc on that data because the vendor can't or will take 6 months and cost a bunch of money to create it. I knock out their request in hours, not months.