Microsoft Access vs. Oracle TimesTen

As a Material Purchasing/Planning/inventory tracking application, Microsoft Access serves its purpose well. It's presentation is clean, data entry is simple and the ability to customize search fields is welcome. It does, however, come with some caveats; namely, when setting search filters and the need arises to back up a step or two, with Microsoft Access you have to reset, or "clear all", adding extra steps/time to a query.

Incentivized

TimesTen is well suited for applications using smaller data or smaller data stores and where transaction response times are not as business critical. TimesTen is good for applications already accessing Oracle and need to cache data for quick read/write operations. TimesTen is not appropriate for large data dependent applications or applications requiring fast response times. In these cases, using Oracle database or Exadata is better

Incentivized

• Very easy to create entity-relationship diagrams for various tables and designing mock layouts.
• Really easy to navigate as it hold[s] the classic Microsoft UI. Another good thing is that it comes with the complete MS Office Suite.
• It is really fast when joining multiple tables no matter what type of join.
• Works on pretty much same SQL scripts so no need to learn a new language!

Incentivized

• With basic database experience, TimesTen has a very short learning curve.
• The installation and setup is easy and straightforward. The command line instructions are easy to follow.
• The error logging mechanism is simple and efficient. The system log files are helpful in troubleshooting problems with using TimesTen.
• The maintenance tools are user friendly and effective. Upgrading is easy and quick. TimesTen is almost a self-administrating database.

Incentivized

• Microsoft Access has not really changed at all for several years. It might be nice to see some upgrades and changes.
• The help info is often not helpful. Need more tutorials for Microsoft Access to show how to do specific things.
• Be careful naming objects such as tables, forms, etc. Names that are too long can get cut off in dialog boxes to choose a table, form, report, etc. So, I wish they would have resizable dialog boxes to allow you to see objects with long names.
• I wish it could show me objects that are not in use in the database for current queries, tables, reports, forms, and macros. That way unused objects can be deleted without worrying about losing a report or query because you deleted the underlying object.

Incentivized

• Provide better monitoring tools of TimesTen daemon, servers and connections.
• Improved support for APIs. The libraries lack the necessary code for applications to customize for applications using TimesTen.

Incentivized

I and the rest of my team will renew our Microsoft Access in the future because we use and maintain many different applications and databases created using Microsoft Access so we will need to maintain them in the future. Additionally, it is a standard at our place of work so it is at $0 cost to us to use. Another reason for renewing Microsoft Access is that we just don' t have the resources needed to extend into a network of users so we need to remain a single-desktop application at this time.

Microsoft Access is easy to use. It is compatible with spreadsheets. It is a very good data management tool. There is scope to save a large amount of data in one place. For using this database, one does not need much training, can be shared among multiple users. This database has to sort and filtering features which seem to be very useful.

Incentivized

I don't think the program has ever failed me. It is one of those programs where there is always a solution if you know where to look.

Incentivized

While I have never contacted Microsoft directly for product support, for some reason there's a real prejudice against MS Access among most IT support professionals. They are usually discouraging when it comes to using MS Access. Most of this is due to their lack of understanding of MS Access and how it can improve one's productivity. If Microsoft invested more resources towards enhancing and promoting the use of MS Access then maybe things would be different.

Incentivized

there is no key idea, since it is easy to implement Microsoft Access

Excel is a fantastic - robust application that can do so much so easily. Its easy to train and understand. However - excel does not provide a reporting function and that is typically where we will suggest a move to [Microsoft] Access. [Microsoft] Access requires a little more knowledge of data manipulation.

Incentivized

Sybase does not have an in-memory database until version 15 so TimesTen was ideal for caching data. TimesTen has reliable replication and backing up mechanisms. Oracle takes longer to set up and use for most applications where as TimesTen is a smaller DBMS that is quick and easy to set up and use. TimesTen can connect to Oracle for caching data so using Oracle as a backend makes sense

Incentivized

• Not having to recreate queries or reports every time you want to use them.
• Once an item is created and saved as part of the database, you save manpower by not having to recreate them.
• ROI from a usability standpoint is great. Solid product with great functionality that requires low maintenance usually.

Incentivized

• TimesTen has had a positive impact from a developer's perspective because implementing TimesTen is quick and easy. The benefits of TimesTen can be seen almost instantly. For instance, the application start up time is faster, the data is easy to maintain and the performance is fast for TimesTen clients.
• TimesTen has had a positive impact for the business because it can be made accessible to users via a GUI. This gives users transparency to the data at any time.
• The negative impact is that once the TimesTen database has grown too large, the application should move to using Oracle database or else it suffers from performance degradation and stability issues.

Incentivized