<story><title>Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won&apos;t Die</title><url>https://medium.com/young-coder/microsoft-access-the-zombie-database-software-that-wont-die-5b09e389c166</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jdfellow</author><text>I wonder how much effort it would take to build a desktop application providing a similar user experience to Access, using SQLite.</text></item><item><author>WrtCdEvrydy</author><text>I wonder if sqlite could become this in the future.</text></item><item><author>drblast</author><text>Huh, similar story here. The nuclear department on my carrier needed to produce this monthly report for training hours that would take them a ton of manual effort. There was no budget at all for any kind of automation but Access was on every machine.&lt;p&gt;I know what I&amp;#x27;m doing with databases. I never want to use Access if I don&amp;#x27;t have to. But it has the enviable property of &amp;quot;no server administration required&amp;quot; which meant that we could backup the DB to a shared drive and people after me could modify the thing without being a DBA.&lt;p&gt;The amount of time that database saved really is mind-boggling.</text></item><item><author>jotakami</author><text>A number of years ago I was in the Navy and worked in an electronics shop on an aircraft carrier. We were responsible for calibrating and repairing all the test and measurement equipment for the entire ship as well as the squadrons that we carried with us. Easily over 10k individual pieces of equipment, each of which had to be calibrated on a specific schedule. Most of this data was managed centrally, and we sent&amp;#x2F;received DB updates a couple times a week. However, just managing our workload and operations efficiently required other data which was not part of this database. I had no choice but to build my own solution, and the only real option was MS Access given the barren IT resources available on a deployed aircraft carrier.&lt;p&gt;But man, was it a fucking lifesaver. Just for one example, we often had to send equipment out to different labs since we didn’t have the capability to test them, and shipping stuff required a standard military shipping document with various mundane pieces of information about the stuff being sent. Creating these documents was a tedious process of looking up the data manually and then typing it into a Word file. I just recreated the document as an Access form, with fields that would populate from a query. Creating the shipping documents went from 30-45 mins to essentially the click of a single button.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ako</author><text>Maybe you can use Access as the front end to SQLite?&lt;p&gt;During my internship 25 years ago I build a system to register aircraft accidents and near accidents. This system used access 1.0 (Windows 3.1) as the front end, storing the data in Oracle 6, I think connected through Odbc.</text></comment>
<story><title>Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won&apos;t Die</title><url>https://medium.com/young-coder/microsoft-access-the-zombie-database-software-that-wont-die-5b09e389c166</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jdfellow</author><text>I wonder how much effort it would take to build a desktop application providing a similar user experience to Access, using SQLite.</text></item><item><author>WrtCdEvrydy</author><text>I wonder if sqlite could become this in the future.</text></item><item><author>drblast</author><text>Huh, similar story here. The nuclear department on my carrier needed to produce this monthly report for training hours that would take them a ton of manual effort. There was no budget at all for any kind of automation but Access was on every machine.&lt;p&gt;I know what I&amp;#x27;m doing with databases. I never want to use Access if I don&amp;#x27;t have to. But it has the enviable property of &amp;quot;no server administration required&amp;quot; which meant that we could backup the DB to a shared drive and people after me could modify the thing without being a DBA.&lt;p&gt;The amount of time that database saved really is mind-boggling.</text></item><item><author>jotakami</author><text>A number of years ago I was in the Navy and worked in an electronics shop on an aircraft carrier. We were responsible for calibrating and repairing all the test and measurement equipment for the entire ship as well as the squadrons that we carried with us. Easily over 10k individual pieces of equipment, each of which had to be calibrated on a specific schedule. Most of this data was managed centrally, and we sent&amp;#x2F;received DB updates a couple times a week. However, just managing our workload and operations efficiently required other data which was not part of this database. I had no choice but to build my own solution, and the only real option was MS Access given the barren IT resources available on a deployed aircraft carrier.&lt;p&gt;But man, was it a fucking lifesaver. Just for one example, we often had to send equipment out to different labs since we didn’t have the capability to test them, and shipping stuff required a standard military shipping document with various mundane pieces of information about the stuff being sent. Creating these documents was a tedious process of looking up the data manually and then typing it into a Word file. I just recreated the document as an Access form, with fields that would populate from a query. Creating the shipping documents went from 30-45 mins to essentially the click of a single button.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>_AzMoo</author><text>Why would you do that though? The underlying database technology is not really one of the problems access has.</text></comment>