> Access is for people who should be programmers but aren't yet. If you find yourself thinking about Access it's probably time to hire some proper programmers
I hear this all the time, I wonder if you could expand on your reasons for this belief. Is Access always the wrong tool for any job?
I know of a few smallish (5 to 25 or so employees) that have been running their companies for well over a decade on quite large and complex custom written Access applications that were developed for far, far less than it would have cost to have it done "properly".
There are hard limits to Access's internal engine (JET, IIRC) which you're likely to run into as time goes on. The unfortunate thing is that there isn't anything you can do to avoid the limits or recover once you've hit them.
On the other hand, you can install Postgres under Windows and then build an Access frontend over ODBC. This gets you the best of both worlds, IMO, at the cost of running a kind of odd stack. Cheaper than SQL Server though, and I like the maintenance story better.
TBH the last time I considered a solution like this I was consulting, so it was a few years ago, and all my clients either didn't sign up at all or went for a custom web solution instead, so I don't have a lot of war stories about this platform. I do think it would work though.
JET's days are long gone. The SQL Server Desktop engine is the underpinning for Access now. It essentially _is_ SQL Server. The biggest limitation? The concurrent transaction count is limited to 5. There are others, but it is a far, far cry from that prone to corrupt, slow beast JET.
One of my clients has a poorly designed access system (using, now, mssql as the backend). It's not access's fault that the system is shit, it's the developer's fault.
Bad devs write bad code. Beginner bad devs tend to write their bad code in Access (or Excel). It gets the job done --- until it doesn't.
I hear this all the time, I wonder if you could expand on your reasons for this belief. Is Access always the wrong tool for any job?
I know of a few smallish (5 to 25 or so employees) that have been running their companies for well over a decade on quite large and complex custom written Access applications that were developed for far, far less than it would have cost to have it done "properly".