Future of Access

[49er54]

I have been using Filemaker Pro for a number of years. I took a sabbatical from the company I work for and have n ow returned. They want some more advanced solutions. We have decided to try the Access platform but I do have a big question before I invest the time, energy, and money to learn the platform.
I have noticed that on the Microsoft Roadmap, there are no plans for new features or capabilities. Is that significant?
Access is not pushed by Microsoft. It seems that is rather deliberately kept in the background. Is it second tier interest on their part?



I don't want to invest my future earning abilities on something that is going to go away.

Any thoughts out there?

[Minty]

This has become almost a FAQ , believe it or not for over the 15 years at least.

They still have a development team and they still are making updates to various things.
The latest official news is here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...1-98a456cb3496

In my opinion there isn't anything else out there that is such a good RAD tool, that can connect to so many different data sources.
You can obviously store your data in Access, but also SQL server, Azure SQL, MySQL, AWS etc. etc.

In recent times they have released two new Template file (Northwind starter and development editions) that are significant improvements of the previous versions.

So, is it going away. Personally, no I don't think so.
There are some "interesting" articles on the net that disagree with my opinion, but none of them offer any vaguely suitable or well supported replacements.

[Micron]

I characterize it as an urban legend that will never die.

[NoellaG]

I don't think that Access will go away. But I've seen in the latest 10 years more and more (large) companies that have thrown Access from their network. Users have to use the corporate software (mostly SAP or other ERP) or Excel. Own development is done in Visual studio. All the customers I work for have company policies stating we can't accept connections to our SQL server park from Office applications.
But I think Access will remain an option for private solutions or small companies

[CJ_London]

looking at the similar threads at the bottom of this thread, I see much the same question was asked 16 years ago.

In particular look at the post from October last year for a fairly recent update from MS about Access

Of course you can never say never

[Edgar]

The time you invest learning how to use Access will translate very well to other platforms. If you learn to model databases in MS Access, you'll learn how to do it anywhere else, if SQL is used (that's most of the market). If you learn to create forms in MS Access, you'll know what most forms need out there, regardless of the platform. Things like events, the flow of data, most of that Access can teach you.

The weakness it has are web/visuals/security. I don't know if it's going away. Most probably not, but read this:
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023...ogies-database

It's the 14th most used out of the 32 database technologies in that poll. Hint: the most used technology is 100% Excel, how come it's not anywhere in the entire poll? well, most Excel users are not even aware of this poll. However, most developers of the other technologies there are very aware of this poll, I hope you understand what I mean.

[NoellaG]

If you learn to model databases in MS Access, you'll learn how to do it anywhere else, if SQL is used (that's most of the market). .

Partly true, I experienced that Acces users that switch to SQL Server have a lot of bad habits. If a newby starts in our DBA group, the sentence 'I worked with Access' raises a red flag.

[madpiet]

Partly true, I experienced that Acces users that switch to SQL Server have a lot of bad habits. If a newby starts in our DBA group, the sentence 'I worked with Access' raises a red flag.

LOL. You know it's a bad sign when someone uses "Hungarian" notation in table and column names in SQL Server.

[Edgar]

I know that stage, guys. Been there, done that. Bashing Access, that is.

[madpiet]

Parts of Access are good. As a RAD tool, it’s great. But if you try to extend the query “language” … what a hot mess.
I didn’t realize how gimped it was until I got my head part way around TSQL. And that’s not as complex as it gets.