Why use Access DB ?

Why use Access DB ?

It's common to use Access for small, noncritical tasks even if a larger, more robust system is available. Occasionally, an Access database grows beyond its original purpose. After a year or two of use, an Access database can become vital to the organization. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen. At this point, the IT professional faces a challenge -- revamp the Access database or upgrade, and both require a lot of work.

  • Poor security; Access security simply isn't as robust as you might need. You can password-protect and even encrypt data, but Access doesn't offer the same level of security as SQL Server
  • Access is hard to deploy; there are several versions, upgrades can also be a nuisance (ex global upgrade for Microsoft Office )
  • File-server application; , Access is a file-server application and not a client-server application. That means that Access does all its processing on one server. Client-server applications process on both sides of the network. While that arrangement is more flexible, it also comes with overhead.
  • Money; Access applications are cheaper to build and maintain than the more sophisticated productions of SQL Server and Oracle
  • Reliability, integrity and availability; corruption is one area where Access is weak , Regardless of the source, corruption is a real problem; the possibility to have concurrent users is not possible. Backup and Restore of the data is not consistent like SQL/Oracle. 
  • Access isn’t a professional database
  • Supporting issue; while the database might get the job done, it's usually inefficient and difficult to maintain. Invariably, these innovative folks end up calling IT to help resolve a bug or add a new feature. Some IT professionals simply refuse to help, and understandably so. That kind of problem-solving and debugging is difficult and time-consuming. Access uses Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) as its development language. Technically, VBA is a subset of Visual Basic (VB)

Use SQL Server or Oracle express editions, which are free and support upto 10 Gb datasize. Beyond 10 GB the database must be hosted on appropriate SQL Server or Oracle versions i.e. Standard edition at least!

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