Microsoft Access vs. SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE)

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

We use this for an inbuilt security management system, where it performs well in a scaled setup with a large volume of live data with high availability. Also, the performance is up to the mark for the large statement flow. From a DBA perspective, a lot of parameters need to be fine-tuned for the specific environment needs, which can cause overhead. Expertise is limited, and the learning curve is steep for the SAP ASE.

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

• High availability and reliability.
• High performance.
• Monitoring of threshold based events.
• Security at multiple levels.
• Query plan optimization.
• Lock management.
• Access to HANA.

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

• A quick button for devs to switch instances into a dev mode (eliminating logs, and such).
• Licensing is far too complicated. Simplify pricing.

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.

Our licenses are perpetual. It is the support that we will be renewing. We will renew because we continue to use and receive value from the product.

Incentivized

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

Well-suited in the security domain, high performance, and low latency of the DBMS. In terms of the DBA perspective, a dedicated monitoring tool (Cockpit) helps a lot in terms of managing the database, which helps in identifying bottlenecks during performance issues. Also, it helps us to send custom alerts related to Database activities.

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

Incredibly responsive, saving us countless hours in troubleshooting.

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

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

• Positive ROI.
• Ease of use with minimal training required to write high performance SQL (assumes a knowledge of SQL already).
• Ease of database administration.
• Sometimes upgrades can be difficult.
• Changing platforms can be difficult (changing say from SPARC to Intel).
• Changing operating systems can be difficult (changing from Solaris to linux).

Incentivized