To me.Gratitude IS Everything! DeleteĪs above commenter said.
Not bad for a software that costs as little as $100! If it wasn't for MS Access.I wouldn't have had the successful career in IT that I have immensely enjoyed to date. To duplicate the functionality and features Access encompasses would cost tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars. Today it's much better doing a MS Access app integrated with Sharepoint, tho.Īs with every lecting the proper tool for the task at hand - all things considered - is important to success. From an IT Professional, with significant software development experience, there should be double the number of these kinds of Access DB applications.far easier for a Business Analyst to analyze and understand than the football-field size excel spreadsheets.Īnd just so the author knows.ACCESS does have a built in feature to migrate the backend to an SQL Server database with a Access frontend. What is the first step to solving this issue? Please, stop creating MS Access Databases!Įxcellent uldn't have said it better myself! More to the point.I dare say that the majority of projects the author did indeed work on started out as one of those ad hoc MS AccessDB. If the business user needed to perform a quick analysis and IT wasn't accessible, available, or had the necessary agility to solution, then it is likely that a SpreadSheet Jockey or a SadBA established a solution. Is this your company's sales data, customer data, marketing data, or financial data? More likely, the answer is yes because it's this data that business users work with the most. It is part of the company's dark data - data that exists but can't easily be analyzed for intelligence or insight.
But if there are numerous databases stored all over the place with undocumented data dictionaries, unknown data quality, and little understanding of how to relate data sources, then it is virtually impossible to perform broad analytics on it. This can easily be done in MS Excel or even better, by selecting and correctly leveraging a self service BI tool. It's relatively easy for a business user to perform analysis on a single data source, or even a handful if the data relationships are understood. Perhaps you've never had to read someone else's code?Įven smaller companies are recognizing the benefits of analytics and Big Data processing. If any forms were developed and especially if multiple people are using the database as part of a workflow, then you'll need a Business Analyst and possibly an Application Developer to consider how these business processes are accomplished.
Consider even a single database, a trained DBA would need to understand the underlying data model, document any scripts or procedures loading data, and itemize reporting needs.
IT will probably be asked to perform heroics when a desktop fails and there isn't a sufficient backup, or when there is an MS Office upgrade being planned and these databases need testing, or when the SadBA is leaving the company and no one understands how to support these databases.Īs big of a database mess this is, the underlying data mess can be a daunting maze to unwind. She only calls in IT if she needs something scripted such as more advanced forms or jobs that can load and transform new data.įlash forward a few years and consider if this behavior is repeated across multiple organizations and locations and you have a classic database mess.
Even worse is when new opportunities present themselves and she decides to create additional MS Access databases. The bad news is that if this database is "successful" it will likely draw others to it forcing the SadBA (self appointed database business analyst) to consider granting access to her desktop stored database, developing forms, and producing reports. She thinks, "It's just a couple of tables and I already have MS Access on my desktop", so this shouldn't be too hard. It all starts very simply and innocently with someone needing a place to store data that is a little bit more than what is convenient to store in Microsoft Excel.