Microsoft Access is perfect but only for the right departmental use cases.
September 15, 2017
Microsoft Access is perfect but only for the right departmental use cases.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Access
Microsoft Access is used as a point solution in several departments but does not have any sort of organization wide use case. The main use for Access is used as a consolidation point for spreadsheets from multiple sources for analysis. Access is also used as an easy to build front end to write to a more robust database via linked tables functionality.
- If you have a database that needs to be manually updated but doesn't have a traditional front end application to write to it, Microsoft Access gives you a simple front end to update linked tables without having to write SQL insert/update/delete statements.
- Microsoft Access is a quick way to to combine multiple datasets for analysis.
- Microsoft Access can handle data volumes larger than Microsoft Excel.
- Microsoft Access does not have full parity with a traditional SQL Database so many functions are unavailable and any existing SQL must typically be rewritten to use in Access.
- Access does not offer the same reliability, scalability, resilience and performance of a traditional RDBMS.
- Because Access is often a departmental solution, disaster recovery can be an issue if something happens to the machine it is running on or the user who maintains it.
- Negative impact is generally around supportability. If you create a read/write app in Access it isn't centralized so if a change is necessary you have to proliferate that change to each desktop where the application is running.
- In certain instances, those Access front ends can be a much quicker way to develop an application.
- The proliferation of Microsoft Access databases can make data governance very difficult.
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 Microsoft Access and it's use should be limited to that.