Die Access Die!

I've taken a pretty good look at Office 2007 and the new Access, and the one thing that goes through my head is the same thing that goes through every time I see Access... when is MS finally going to just get rid of this thing? What real purpose does it really serve anymore? For tiny shops, you still have to buy it, and MS has other solutions that are just as easy and completely free. You can get SQL Server Expr

I've taken a pretty good look at Office 2007 and the new Access, and the one thing that goes through my head is the same thing that goes through every time I see Access... when is MS finally going to just get rid of this thing? What real purpose does it really serve anymore? For tiny shops, you still have to buy it, and MS has other solutions that are just as easy and completely free.

You can get SQL Server Express for free, as well as Visual Studio Express. And Visual Studio 2005 comes with lots of templates and wizards so creating whatever code you need should be fairly easy. I just think that continuing to support Access is fairly useless and it's time for it to die.

Not only has Access run its course, but using SQL2K5 Express/VS05 is actually smarter. Not only are they free (and you still have to buy Access), but it's a much smarter upgrade path. I seriously doubt that any of the small businesses out there dream of staying exactly where they are, and never want to grow at all. And as a business owner, you need to look into the future and consider things that will put your company in a good position on down the line. Well, making the decision to stay away from Access is a good business decision. Not only will you not have to buy Access (my solution is free), but when your business grows, the upgrade path from SQL2K5 Express to Workgroup or Standard is super easy. In fact, you have but to attach the DB files to the new system and your application works as before. You don't have an upgrade path with Access... it doesn't exist. When you out-grow Access, you have to convert to SQL Server (or other RDBMS) and then upgrade your front-end code to match. It's a huge pain and sometimes you can't match things up perfectly and have you re-architect. The IT world is full of stories of Access to SQL conversions.

SQL files also don't get corrupted like Access files do. You put an access file on your server, and pretty soon you'll need to fix corruption on it. Let's face it, Access is an out-dated, small-minded way to do things. If everyone did business in Access, you'd have huge file server farms acting as DB servers.