Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 13th Jul 2009 19:02 UTC
"The next version of Office moved a step closer to reality on Monday as Microsoft released an invitation-only technical preview of Office 2010. However, the release of the software will be limited. Attendees of this week's Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans, as well as the recent TechEd show, will gain access to the desktop versions of Office 2010." More here.
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Member since:
2007-09-08
If by "Access" you mean the database engine, then I'd agree. It's slow, unreliable, has absolutely terrible performance with concurrent users, is nearly unusable over a network, and has a completely useless security model.
That said... BerkleyDB is fast and reliable, but isn't comparable with Access, since it's not a relational database. SQLite is, again, fast and reliable, but lacks referential integrity constraints, treats field types as nothing more than a guideline, and inherits the same problems inherent to any file-based database - poor concurrency, and no security model.
Other than the database engine, the only bad thing about Access (aside from being nearly unmaintained for 10 years) is much the same as the main problem with PHP. It's easy enough to use that people with no idea what they're doing can build something that works. It'll make a hell of a mess when it eventually breaks on them, of course - that's the point most IT professionals will first get to see the Access database that contains vital business data, but is now completely broken.
As a database front-end, if you know what you're doing with it, it's actually pretty decent.
For example, you can ignore the Access database engine entirely, and connect to any real database server you like using ODBC, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft's SQL Server Express, and probably more.
Of course, someone who does know what they're doing could probably build a better UI on another platform, but it'd take them longer, and giving the users the ability to do ad-hoc queries and reports (which they will invariably want to do) would be a huge undertaking.
Edited 2009-07-14 14:51 UTC