Microsoft Access is a database management system from Microsoft that combines the relational Microsoft Jet Database Engine with a graphical user interface and software-development tools.
$139.99
per PC
SingleStore
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
SingleStore aims to enable organizations to scale from one to one million customers, handling SQL, JSON, full text and vector workloads in one unified platform.
Visual FoxPro is a discontinued software, and no longer has support. Also, very few people still use it, or ever know how to use it. Excel is very popular, but [Microsoft] Access can do things like data joins much easier and faster
Although SQL is a full-blown platform for heavy database management, Microsoft Access serves the purpose perfectly for small and mid-scale enterprises. It is also perfect for people just getting started with database management. The graphical user interface is a major plus …
Unlike enterprise-level databases, MS Access doesn't require setting up a complex server environment with user security schemes. It's an excellent tool for small scale databases where purchasing and setting up a product like MS SQL Server could be an overkill. Unlike …
Microsoft Access is a bit dated compared to other database tools. It is slower, not able to handle quantities of data that are as large as the other tools, and a bit more finicky. However, it is sometimes the preferred tool for some clients. It also has a lower barrier to entry …
Verified User
Employee
Chose Microsoft Access
MS Access is the little brother to all these products. In no way is it as feature-rich as the competition I have selected. It is, however, great when used properly. It does not have the same level of security, availability, access, or recoverability as anything listed above. …
Access is more robust than Excel in terms of data-centricity and robustness. It however isn't meant to support an enterprise-level use case like SQL Server is. That sweet spot in the middle (a departmental solution that requires more than Excel can offer) is the sweet spot for …
much faster processing of queries than all above-listed databases and having the ability to scale up according to the workload.
Microsoft SQL Server
Verified User
Employee
Chose Microsoft SQL Server
Microsoft Access while a data tool cannot scale to number of concurrent users or the great amount of files needed to run a business. Microsoft Access can attach to sql server as a backend but the interface is still limited to less than 20 concurrent users at a time.
Verified User
Technician
Chose Microsoft SQL Server
Microsoft SQL is slower than MySQL and Access but far more feature-rich and reliable. Access is almost obsolete nowadays, so not too many people are considering it, but unless budget or an open-source ethos is a factor, Microsoft SQL is superior in every way. Many commonly used …
All of the platforms have their own benefit. I was not the decision maker in selecting Microsoft SQL Server, as it was already being utilized when I joined the company, 7 years ago. I can say that I feel more comfortable with utilizing this platform as opposed to the other ones.
The free version is very powerfull and easy to install and use for small companies. Going to Professional and Standard, gives you all the support and the flexibility needed. It is known within the Database Administrator crew, and you can get support very easily over the …
I use Crystal and Microsoft SQL Server with each other. Each has a unique role that it brings to every query. Microsoft SQL Server allows me to write and refine my base query. Crystal allows me to take that query and make it more visually appealing and easier to interpret.
SQL Server is a better choice for quick time to market solutions and for easier maintenance. Oracle Database setup and programming to support solutions has a harder learning curve and it requires more time and effort to hit the ground running.
I started working with databases many years ago with Access, which allows you to create relational database and provide an old-fashioned desktop interface. I had a look at Oracle but I never had the opportunity to get to the bottom (also because of the budget that had the …
Years ago I used Oracle and Oracle Data Integrator and I hated it. It was cumbersome and archaic and I couldn't believe the product could be so popular. Given a database related task and a choice between Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server, SQL Server wins hands down in ease of use, …
I have used Microsoft Access, MySQL, and I have been a user of systems that run on Oracle database servers. All but Oracle are really intended for smaller scale projects and teams as they start to get slow or the performance will suffer once you start getting lots of data input …
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.
Good for Applications needing instant insights on large, streaming datasets. Applications processing continuous data streams with low latency. When a multi-cloud, high-availability database is required When NOT to Use Small-scale applications with limited budgets Projects that do not require real-time analytics or distributed scaling Teams without experience in distributed databases and HTAP architectures.
Microsoft SQL is ubiquitous, while MySQL runs under the hood all over the place. Microsoft SQL is the platform taught in colleges and certification courses and is the one most likely to be used by businesses because it is backed by Microsoft. Its interface is friendly (well, as pleasant as SQL can be) and has been used by so many for so long that resources are freely available if you encounter any issues.
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.
It does not release a patch to have back porting; it just releases a new version and stops support; it's difficult to keep up to that pace.
Support engineers lack expertise, but they seem to be improving organically.
Lacks enterprise CDC capability: Change data capture (CDC) is a process that tracks and records changes made to data in a database and then delivers those changes to other systems in real time.
For enterprise-level backup & restore capability, we had to implement our model via Velero snapshot backup.
Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise edition has a high cost but is the only edition which supports SQL Always On Availability Groups. It would be nice to include this feature in the Standard version.
Licensing of Microsoft SQL Server is a quite complex matter, it would be good to simplify licensing in the future. For example, per core vs per user CAL licensing, as well as complex licensing scenarios in the Cloud and on Edge locations.
It would be good to include native tools for converting Oracle, DB2, Postgresql and MySQL/MariaDB databases (schema and data) for import into Microsoft SQL Server.
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 understand that the Microsoft SQL Server will continue to advance, offering the same robust and reliable platform while adding new features that enable us, as a software center, to create a superior product. That provides excellent performance while reducing the hardware requirements and the total cost of ownership of our solution.
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.
[Until it is] supported on AWS ECS containers, I will reserve a higher rating for SingleStore. Right now it works well on EC2 and serves our current purpose, [but] would look forward to seeing SingleStore respond to our urge of feature in a shorter time period with high quality and security.
SQL Server mostly 'just works' or generates error messages to help you sort out the trouble. You can usually count on the product to get the job done and keep an eye on your potential mistakes. Interaction with other Microsoft products makes operating as a Windows user pretty straight forward. Digging through the multitude of dialogs and wizards can be a pain, but the answer is usually there somewhere.
Solutions are based around a business needs and even when implementing such solution, real time insights are also followed through showing the updates the business are implementing while informing the end users as what is new with technology.
SingleStore excels in real-time analytics and low-latency transactions, making it ideal for operational analytics and mixed workloads. Snowflake shines in batch analytics and data warehousing with strong scalability for large datasets. SingleStore offers faster data ingestion and query execution for real-time use cases, while Snowflake is better for complex analytical queries on historical data.
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.
The support deep dives into our most complexed queries and bizarre issues that sometimes only we get comparing to other clients. Our special workload (thousands of Kafka pipelines + high concurrency of queries). The response match to the priority of the request, P1 gets immediate return call. Missing features are treated, they become a client request and being added to the roadmap after internal consideration on all client needs and priority. Bugs are patched quite fast, depends on the impact and feasible temporary workarounds. There is no issue that we haven't got a proper answer, resolution or reasoning
We managed to handle most of our problems by looking into Microsoft's official documentation that has everything explained and almost every function has an example that illustrates in detail how a particular functionality works. Just like PowerShell has the ability to show you an example of how some cmdlet works, that is the case also here, and in my opinion, it is a very good practice and I like it.
We allowed 2-3 months for a thorough evaluation. We saw pretty quickly that we were likely to pick SingleStore, so we ported some of our stored procedures to SingleStore in order to take a deeper look. Two SingleStore people worked closely with us to ensure that we did not have any blocking problems. It all went remarkably smoothly.
Other than SQL taking quite a bit of time to actually install there are no problems with installation. Even on hardware that has good performance SQL can still take close to an hour to install a typical server with management and reporting services.
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.
Greenplum is good in handling very large amount of data. Concurrency in Greenplum was a major problem. Features available in SingleStore like Pipelines and in memory features are not available in Greenplum. Gemfire was not scaling well like SingleStore. Support of both Greenplum and Gemfire was not good. Product team did not help us much like the ones in SingleStore who helped us getting started on our first cluster very fast.
[Microsoft] SQL Server has a much better community and professional support and is overall just a more reliable system with Microsoft behind it. I've used MySQL in the past and SQL Server has just become more comfortable for me and is my go to RDBMS.
As the overall performance and functionality were expanded, we are able to deliver our data much faster than before, which increases the demand for data.
Metadata is available in the platform by default, like metadata on the pipelines. Also, the information schema has lots of metadata, making it easy to load our assets to the data catalog.
Increased accuracy - We went from multiple users having different versions of an Excel spreadsheet to a single source of truth for our reporting.
Increased Efficiency - We can now generate reports at any time from a single source rather than multiple users spending their time collating data and generating reports.
Improved Security - Enterprise level security on a dedicated server rather than financial files on multiple laptop hard drives.
