Microsoft Access vs. Percona Server for MySQL

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

Percona Server for MySQL covers 100% of our requirements in terms of our OLTP traffic and provides the High Availability levels required through a typical primary and 2 replica's using semi-synchronous replication. We're able to scale our writes using sharding, but a true distributed database would be a great option on top of this. In terms of OLAP traffic, we leverage columns stores available, but Percona Server fairs well

• 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

• Faster than other server solutions
• Installation and configuration process is easy from the user's standpoint
• Easy to learn and good support

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

• Better documentation
• A better UI

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

It is easy to install and use. Using it along with Percona Monitoring and Management makes it even easier to use.

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

We are using opensource so we have not used customer support.

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

Performance and stability sets Percona Server for MySQL apart from the rest. Percona embraces the upstream version and contributes towards the upstream version making MySQL stronger on two fronts and thus having a much larger community. Many quality contributions have been made by Percona into the base code. Percona provides great tools to support Percona Server for MySQL and this makes the monitoring and management easier

• 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

• At the performance level, it maintains and even improves other open-source databases such as MariaDB or some commercial ones such as Oracle.
• If we compare it with MySQL, we could have up to 50% improvement in performance.
• For some small companies or startups, the price of the complete solution and the support can be a bit high.

Incentivized