Man, Microsoft Access got a lot of well-deserved hate, but it was a very easy way for someone who didn’t really know what they were doing to set up a relational database.
But everyone thought, “We’ll just continue to treat Excel spreadsheets like a database, that’ll be fine.”
Access fills a very specific niche that is right in between “too big for Excel” and “too small for SQL Express”.
The problem is that this window is very narrow, and after just a small amount of growth, it suddenly makes sense to migrate again to proper SQL. In my(admittedly limited) experience it was almost always better to just skip Access.
Search for “low-code app frameworks”, there are a whole bunch, they fill the same niche now that Access once did (though these tend to be cloud based, not local sqlite). Baserow is a great open-source example.
Man, Microsoft Access got a lot of well-deserved hate, but it was a very easy way for someone who didn’t really know what they were doing to set up a relational database.
But everyone thought, “We’ll just continue to treat Excel spreadsheets like a database, that’ll be fine.”
Access fills a very specific niche that is right in between “too big for Excel” and “too small for SQL Express”.
The problem is that this window is very narrow, and after just a small amount of growth, it suddenly makes sense to migrate again to proper SQL. In my(admittedly limited) experience it was almost always better to just skip Access.
I wish there was something in between but based on SQLite.
Search for “low-code app frameworks”, there are a whole bunch, they fill the same niche now that Access once did (though these tend to be cloud based, not local sqlite). Baserow is a great open-source example.