Hi Frnds,

              This time I will not ask you any technical questions from MS ACCESS. As I am working on MS ACCESS, I just want to know from you people that IS THERE ANY MARKET VALUE OF MS ACCESS in MNCs or other company? Because some of my frnds told me that this is valueless software in today’s IT industry. Can you please tell me the truth??

Thanks

The value of Access depends entirely upon the requirements of your business environment.

Is it a valuable tool for designing n-tier, physically distributed, object-oriented applications with multiple user interfaces (Windows Forms, Web Forms, Web Services) that take advantage of COM+ distributed transactions and connection pooling, and pass objects across process boundaries (multiple clients, application servers, web servers, database servers) via remoting and serialization technologies, i.e. the sort of architecture a multinational corporation might be interested in?

No. Thats what .NET/VS 2005 is for.

Is it a valuable tool for designing a database application that enables a couple dozen people in the administrative offices of a local non-profit oragnization that can't afford an IT department to share a file? (Just as one of a gazillion possible examples)?

Absolutely. Incredibly valuable. (Trust me. Been there, done that.)

All depends on what you attempt to do with it.

Bob

I'll get in on this too.

Um, it depends. Most people have overlooked Access because they use it for small clunky home databases, and no one ever bothers to learn all of its capabilities. It is still used quite often in small organizations. Most people try to get away with making Excel do what they should be doing in Access.

If it has a champion within an organization, it can be used quite frequently. We use it a lot in my agency, but they have some big money contractors who are always pushing web enabled databases, but that is just to get the cash.

I do quite sophisticated work with Access, although I should be moving to VB.NET to do the same forms based Windows applications.

I also use Access as a reporting tool since it can capture data from various sources and process the reports locally. This is always a bg hit.

So... I hope that answered some of your concerns. I think people just don't know enough about it... oh, and since everyone seems to install Office differently (even within the same organization) references are sometimes missing, so configuration management is in order.



mmcdonal

Using Baseball as an analogy,
  Excel is the A Ball,
  Access is the AAA Ball,
  Depending on quite a few of things:
     SQL Server, Oracle etc. are the pros.

This is my opinion, if you don't agree, that's OK.
Just thought I'd throw it out.

Kevin
Gosh - I hope someone comes up with a better analogy!!!!!



dartcoach

Well, I think Oracle and SQL don't do what Access can. Access is a DBMS, like Oracle and SQL, but it also has forms and reports, like VB.NET, and web pages, like ColdFusion, ASP, etc, and macros and modules. You would need to use a second suite of data entry and reporting tools, plus some programming to get the features in Access into Oracle and SQL. Plus, Access works with Oracle and SQL.

I really think it is a matter of expertise. Hard core coders don't use Access, and power users don't know Access. But it really integrates quite a large feature set.

So to use your analogy, Oracle and SQL could be like the major leagues, but only if they played but no one could watch them since there is no native way to interact with Oracle or SQL (other than like Query Analyzer).

mmcdonal

Prasanta,

My tuppence worth on this issue:

First question: what do these friends of yours do and/or know about it? Sounds to me, frankly, like very little. Access as an individual office tool is completely and utterly irreplaceable rather than valueless. There is not a single application in the Office market place which has the capacity it has. End of story. No ifs, buts or maybes. It has its own issues, but name any perfect system.

I am biased, being a MS access dev since 2.0, but I just don't know of another product that has the speed & ease of use as Access, or its completeness.

Large scale developments will always be around and more and more "out of the box" (not outside the box!) solutions will become available through time, but the project environment (that is today's business world, like it or not) means that large scale developments will simply not be financially or chronically(!) viable, whilst spreadsheets just won't quite cut it at the lower end of the market. Single analyst on-the-fly developements are the present and future and frankly, from my experience, are what have propped up the inadequacies of the large scale developments in the past.

I have seen many, many systems implementations and yet I have still to encounter any of them with adequate MI reporting or post-entry data analysis going on. This is generally where Access gets involved, after an implementation... to help sort out the mess, that the 3rd party has now created!

I suppose the main thing is that Access isnt really an IT industry users tool... it is a business users tool. You will struggle to find work as an "IT man" working in Access, but a business specialist with Access/VBA will be invaluable to any business.

Like I said, just my tuppence. If you really wanna know the value of the application... look at iProfile's contractor report for Access analyst developers or do a search for Access devs on jobserve (UK, though!).