Microsoft Access vs. RavenDB

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

If you're a.NET developer searching for a system other than SQL Server for business assessment, then you must try RavenDB. RavenDB is a fantastic document-oriented system that has been specifically developed to work with all.NET or Windows systems. Developers are continually working on such systems to eliminate their flaws while also providing a few benefits. We must refresh ourselves on a regular basis since the free software system is like an open area where anybody may stand up with a brilliant solution to the issue. RavenDB is absolutely worth a look

• 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

• Document Database - no Object-Relational Impedance Mismatch
• ACID support that is optimized for performance
• Can be easily integrated into automated tests (unit tests)
• Easily configurable via C# code
• Comes directly with RavenStudio - no SSMS or SQL Developer required
• In general low footprint when it comes to memory and disk consumption
• Useful safety nets for new developers - e.g. by default an exception is thrown when you make too many requests within a session

• 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

• The documentation is very good, but it's sometimes hard to find the topic I'm looking for.
• Updating references is done manually. It would be nice if there was a feature to help with that. I'm not sure that's even possible though.

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.

We've had an excellent experience using RavenDB. Internally we are testing the newer features in 5.0 such as time series, which will effect the con specified previously dependent on the real world performance. We foresee that BattleCrate will continue to use RavenDB as we grow.

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

Really good .NET client that is very easy to use. The management studio is excellent and puts anything that Microsoft or Oracle have to shame. Very quick to develop with once the complexity hurdle has been overcome. Initially using it can be a bit painful until you fully grasp the event sourced nature of the indexing.

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

The support is really fast and flexible. Since one single working day, we got a response to our first request, only 4 days later we got a technical demonstration for our complete developer team to get in touch with raven and its performance. Also during our development, we got a quick response to questions.

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

RavenFS changed along the way and made us change the codes.

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

The given alternatives are also powerful and really good noSQL databases but the highest availability of RavenDB allows me/us to know it a lot better. RavenDB is encrypted by default wherever we use it in production and it has a high level of documents compression.

• 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

• RavenDB has saved my customers a lot of money with their cloud services' tiered model. The database is able to grow with the project/company and can start out small at a low cost.
• RavenDB is free for three nodes and three CPUs, which makes it great for development scenarios. You're able to start rapidly building applications without having to worry about licensing.
• Scaling out has allowed us to use three small cloud servers when starting out and get the performance and throughput of a single larger server.