Part of my daily work includes supporting various Microsoft Access databases, and I’ve been building things with MSAccess for about 11 years now. However, I’ve learned not to mention Access when talking to other developers, as it gets one roundly mocked and, often, sneered at. It seems that ‘real’ developers view Access as a ‘toy’, or worse, a force of evil that allows users to create nightmarish applications that ‘real’ developers then have to support.
But Access itself is not intrinsically evil, it is just a tool. Yes, I’ve seen some horrific examples of just what you can do with MSAccess. But we all make mistakes while learning; the problem really is that businesses then use these badly-designed systems to do important jobs. It is always a mistake to run mission-critical processes on some software written by your nephew as a college project. Yes, the development cost is cheap, but the maintenance cost, or cost to your business in errors, will be high.
There was some discussion at work about whether we should restrict access to Access (sorry!) to stop people being able to create databases. I’m a great believer in empowering users and letting them learn, so I don’t really agree with this approach. But, not wanting an exponential growth in support issues, my policy is that I will help but not support. If you want to learn, learning by mistakes is the best way, and the idea that I won’t bail you out if it all goes nasty hopefully will prevent managers from allowing any of these creations to become critical parts of a business process. I’m an optimist.
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