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Comment by SigmundA | Hacker News Reader

I have a special place in my heart for Access, its where I first started making money writing software and learned SQL and VB. Its where I really felt like I was making something that solved real world problems for people, quickly at that.

It was actually amazing how far it could scale, you could put a shared MDB file out on a Novell network share and have 30 concurrent users with no server app at all, users just doubled clicked the MDB.

I still think there is a killing to made on a modern day Access "Done Right". DB, Gui framework and printable report generator all in one sharing the same language front to back, top to bottom.

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Salesforce, the core database/CRUD bit of it if you ignore all the stuff they've purchased and tacked-on in the last few years, is essentially 'Access in the cloud', in terms of the sorts of things you can do and the ease with which you can do it, and how far you can stretch it before it starts to get cumbersome. And yes, they are making a killing.

edit: And if that sounds easy, imagine how you would go about upgrading and patching and extending your access-like cloud platform twice a year without any significant breakage of any of your customers varied and extensive customisations, and without any significant downtime, and keep that up for 20 years. Thats the thing that Salesforce are good at, and not many people appreciate how difficult it is.

While I agree fundamentally with your premise, I would have to point out that MS Access was always software-as-a-service for developers. Ultimately, while it was accessible, the idea was to give powerful tools to developers to refine an interface/toolset for users.

SalesForce, on the other hand, seems to be more a platform-as-a-service targeted at the user with aspects such as SOQL instead feeling like a bolt-on to give developers access to the data.

So while they fill the same business case, they approach it from a completely opposite perspective.

(Source: software engineer that had to work with SalesForce and other CRM tools extensively while working with data engineers; and that has worked with pre-dotNet ASP + MS Access)

I'm not sure if a cloud version could ever replace access. Access is already paid for, works with on premise data, is easily deployed (no browser version madness), is ubiquitous, is easy to recover from bus factors (search the victims computer for .mdbs) and is easy to control access too.

Salesforce seems like a particularly bad solution, you end up with a small army of high priced, low skilled salesforce contractors and a heap of vendor lock in.

Yes you are right, one minor point though, when people build things in Salesforce the 'source code' is all there and visible (apart from installed third-party packages) and so 'bus factors' are about as easy to recover from as with Access - and there are plenty of Salesforce contractors around. I've seen some organisations kick big consultancy firms off of their salesforce system and then just continue building it themselves.

ServiceNow is a lot easier for admins/developers to use for workflow automation. In my opinion it’s a little easier than Salesforce but it could become bloated like Salesforce if it want already. Quickbase is another one I worked with but I was migrating workflows off of it. Quickbase was good for non IT people but not much better than Access or Excel.

A lot depends on what is actually implemented on top of these systems. I absolutely loathe servicenow because of multi page multilevel forms with horrible, ugly, no good UX I have to deal with.

Yea not the worst UX I’ve seen but far from the best. They give you enough rope to hang yourself and most companies do. They have a new agent workspace to help improve usability.

I loathe Workday. Performance reviews and taking time off have unneeded steps and comments in weird places. The flat and colorful UI looks nice but it’s hard to find stuff.

The people who implement ServiceNow are usually, to put it mildly, idiots. It's usually combined with a religious conversion to some spin of ITIL, which is almost always by default implemented to facilitate a lowest common denominator operational outsourcing engagement.

The nasty forms are always a result of internal politics and bad governance. One client that I worked with had 8 different ways to represent a physical location. Each operational director in the organization had a unique system, and nobody mapped them.

If you put a real development team on the platform and the leadership gets it, it's an amazing tool.

I was curious about ServiceNow and googled it and was excited as they offer demos. But they require registration and a lot of information about myself, so i stopped. Is it not meant for small businesses perhaps?

As a developer who is forced to use a service now interface for interacting with any other part of my organisation it's fucking awful in terms of user interface and friction. Unsure if that is because of our workplace setup or if it's intrinsic to the platform.

At least at my org it's awful because dev teams wrote / spec'd their own UX for "their forms."

Which, as you might imagine, resulted in a huge number of multiple choice, similarly-named properties, with all options also being inscrutablely named.

Long story short: programmers are terrible at UX.

SerivceNow’s partners are godawful at implementation. Thanks to them I have decent job security unraveling the dog shit they left.

Try the developer site, link below. You’ll need to register but it doesn’t look too invasive. It is expensive for small businesses. The main part is an ITSM suite but I’ve built workflows for call centers and account managers.

https://developer.servicenow.com/app.do#!/program/developer

I'm more on the side of: Salesforce is excel online :)

My first real paying gig was Access 97 (I'm old). They actually taught it at my university at the time in the MIS/CIS path. I built a credentialing system for a small HMO. I was able to get it to support over 100 people, including report load. I split out the database from the front end (forms/reports) and put the database files on an NT4 share. When we grew and it started to buckle under load, I created an additional read-only share and replicated the read-write database to the read-only database every so often. This allowed me to split the users' load between those that needed read/write and those that needed read only.

Talk about a rapid design tool of both forms and reports (and schema), Access was tough to beat. I think Corel/WordPerfect had a similar concept as well.

Good times.

I made my first system for a client 20 years ago on MS Access, and the latest one was again (they asked, I didn't say no) I created a mini-MIS for another client. Reports, forms, tables, everything MS Access. I won't be insulted if MS renamed it to "SQL for dummies". Access just works!

I got started using Access 2, so I'm older...

Learned 3NF in an Access 2 class, so I might be older... =)

Dbase3 and Clipper here.

I hear you and raise you a Progress.

Ugh, me too!

My manager was a huge fan of Progress, such that it became the de facto tool of choice whether it fit or not.

I was less of a fan, but just checking now, it still exists! I'm curious about this one blurb from their web site though, which proclaims, "Progress Named a ‘Strong Performer’ in The Forrester Wave™: Low-Code Development Platforms For AD&D Professionals, Q1 2019"

I'm not sure how a database applies to sitting around with dice and figurines, but I've never really understood that whole pro gamer thing.

Hi! I'm working on a project called Retool (https://retool.com), and it's basically Access, in the cloud. We connect to any sort of cloud database / API, and let you build UIs quickly. It's good for building forms that write back to APIs, tables that read data from databases, etc.

I'd really appreciate HN's feedback on this -- if anybody has thoughts -- I'd love to hear them! I'm also david@ if you'd rather email me anything. Thanks!

Hey David - love what you’re doing with Retool. I think it’s a good solution for the front end piece of this challenge. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t Retool focus on working with existing enterprise databases and APIs? If so then I think the missing piece is a DBaaS with great guardrails.

Access (and to a lesser extent, Excel) empower anyone to model their data and manipulate it without asking permission. The problem is they don’t scale well, there are no backups, they don’t show up in a data catalog anywhere, no integration with enterprise SSO, etc. They do benefit from file-focused solutions for these issues (eg the Access file lives on a network drive which is backed up) but they fall far short from what you expect from a production database.

So my challenge is: how can I let anyone in my organization create a new database, with all the backup/authentication/discovery/scalability out of the box, for them to connect to Retool?

Half of the point of Access is that it's not in the cloud; it's a locally installed app that doesn't even require network access or admin rights.

Access has had a decent MySQL connector for a long time so the scalability, availability and other network factors can be a non-issue if Access is used purely as a GUI.

Access is highly underrated.

I was able to build a CRUD app with 20 concurrent users in a month just using a shared directory to host the backend database.

It would have taken a team of engineers 6 months to do the same properly developing a Java web app with Oracle database.

Access does have such easy WYSIWYG reporting tools that I still miss.

I was never more productive than using Access. Once wrote a full budgeting, cost estimating tool. Supposedly impossible. (Access' VBA had an 'eval' function.)

We lost something in the switch from "workgroup" (dBase thru Paradox) to client/server.

Spoiler: ODBC broke the tight coupling of code and persistence. Spawning monstrous hacks like ORMs and ActiveRecord. What Ted Neward famously called The Vietnam of Computer Science.

It took me a very long time to figure out what went wrong. Even longer to fix it.

Cliff hanger, I know. Someday I'll post polish and publish that fix. Using my real name.

The thing that was lost quite frankly was most of the value that desktop productivity software used to provide before Microsoft consumed the market with Windows. It's not that client/server couldn't provide the same (or even better) value, it's that the companies left standing (think Microsoft, Oracle, IBM etc.) had no interest in providing maximum value to customers. They wanted to extract maximum value from customers.

Access was created to compete with and replace those single-user and workgroup dBase-era software solutions from the 80's and early 90's. It helped them to cover the bases of the 'professional' desktop use cases as they won people over with Windows. With that mission complete and all competitors long gone, Microsoft now needs to kill off Access to get more people migrated over to SQL Server solutions which will allow them to extract more value from their customer base.

It's interesting to see that, given that in modern times, Microsoft is the only tech giant that can still build user-empowering software. Not Windows, that's getting dumbed down UX-side. But Office suite still includes Access and Excel, the latter being probably the single highest productivity booster in modern companies (to the chagrin of IT departments).

And you're essentially saying that this is already another order of magnitude worse than what came before Microsoft. Now I wish I was able to see that older software in action.

If you look at how things have progressed from the GUI desktop->web->mobile you get a reasonably good flavor of the trade-offs that have been, and continue to be, made. Compare the richest, most powerful spreadsheet application you can find on the desktop to the same on the web to the same on mobile... there you go ;-) (and it isn't just the relative maturity of the platforms: once one player dominates a platform, things start to stagnate)

If history is any guide, the mobile spreadsheet will never do some (probably much) of what the desktop version did[1] and the desktop version will never get some of the new capabilities of the mobile version[2]... yet over time the less capable, but 'better', mobile app will become the new normal for many. The good news is the mobile version will still be more powerful than whatever platform comes next.

I'm greatly over-simplifying and glossing over some things (esp. re: the dynamics of the text UI and early GUI eras) but I think the basic idea still holds.

[1] It's 'good enough' for the majority of use cases. Some would argue that the lost features were cruft anyway. Which is fine unless you needed that cruft...

[2] The profit motive is no longer strong enough to warrant the needed investment in structural changes to the desktop application

> [1] It's 'good enough' for the majority of use cases. Some would argue that the lost features were cruft anyway. Which is fine unless you needed that cruft...

I don't like that "good enough" argument, because it misses the fact that features shape use patterns. Features are enablers.

To give a random example: I once visited my wife's office, and was given a task I could help them with while waiting. It was a task they did very frequently, and it boiled down to specifying a search query, and then adjusting some data in each of the result. They thought it'll keep me occupied for an hour or two, manually adjusting each of the hundreds of results, but I looked around the software and found a way to do a bulk update hidden somewhere in the UI, and was done in 3 minutes.

I taught the people in that office the trick and they were grateful, but it made me wonder - what if one day the software vendor removes bulk update switch because it's rarely used? It's only rarely used because it's not easily discoverable (but the telemetry will not tell you that). Wondering even further - how much money and opportunity to growth do companies lose on office tasks that are inefficient only because software was developed for the lowest common denominator, and offers no advanced features and no path to mastery?

Agreed and you give a perfect example of the type of feature that is often the first to go.

I don't have a thesis about the business (software publishing) aspects. Well, I do, but it's a tangent: Microsoft's failure to provide the much promised ramp from Access JET to SQL Server (which I also love) alienated me as a dev.

Here I'm only commenting on the impedance mismatch between code (biz logic) and persistence (eg RDBMS) introduced with ODBC. (Specifically, type information in the db schema is lost to the client code.)

Okay, writing this out now, Microsoft (and everyone else), probably didn't appreciate what was lost with ODBC, so didn't consider how to continue the Access style of CRUD to client/server. So we ended up with nonsense like LINQ.

You can do the same in Java.

Netbeans with Swing UI designer and database bean components.

That would mean using a server for the database, which means lots of meetings getting buy in only for it to be prioritized to get done 9 months later.

You also have to deal with DBAs who like to say no and permissions every time you have to make a change.

Even if you broke down all the bureaucratic barriers, Access is still quicker to make a simple to make a simple CRUD UI than Java swing.

Sometimes worse is better.

Not saying I would use Access today but that is because I became a software engineer who has more authority to use the proper tools. When I started out as an data analyst, Access was the only thing available I had to get the job done and it did it well.

The database could run local.

I have experience with both and the NetBeans UI designer is hardly much different.

Now if we compare languages, Basic dialects win hands down for such scenarios.

> I still think there is a killing to made on a modern day Access "Done Right". DB, Gui framework and printable report generator all in one sharing the same language front to back, top to bottom.

Reminds me of Airtable, Monday, Notion or one of these all-purpose productivity tools

Airtable is really good for what it does : makes data-driven tools available for folks who don't want to mess with writing queries or being a DBA, and also has a reasonable API for automations.

For heavy stuff, I'll take Postgres anyday given the choice, but Airtable is great for small user-maintainable tools + dashboards, etc

I think Airtable is great, but it’s lack of aggregate functions really restricts it.

I certainly agree it's no replacement for a proper DB when full SQL functionality is needed, but it does have basic aggregates like count(), sum(), etc, available as formula fields: https://support.airtable.com/hc/en-us/articles/203255215-For...

Yes, but those formulas are scoped to the row, not the worksheet (you can't pass in a range of cells; each row essentially treats its own columns as local variables). SUM() means something completely different in Airtable than in every other spreadsheet out there. I've built out some beautiful Airtables only to find I had to switch to using Google sheets since I couldn't total up the value of a column, something I've been able to do since Lotus 123 in the 90s.

You can aggregate across multiple rows if you use a separate table to aggregate related records. I've done this for a small nonprofit to aggregate event registration data by year by linking the registration records to a new year table. Sounds kludgy, but it works.

Do you have to pay a monthly fee for everybody who uses your Airtable app though?

I think there are also some very low limits to the number rows/columns you are allowed to use?

I'm not really sure - honestly asking...

There is a free plan with 1,200 records per base and unlimited bases.

> I still think there is a killing to made on a modern day Access "Done Right". DB, Gui framework and printable report generator all in one sharing the same language front to back, top to bottom.

I don't know what the actual market [that will pay money] is for it, but I can certainly say I've never seen anything quite like it.

In high school, I worked as a sysadmin/misc. programmer for a company whose whole business was software built on top of Access. I was the weird Linux person who ended up having to do a lot of stuff in Access (97).

It had its issues. It was not perfect. But the simplicity with which you could bind a visual tool and query designer to an ODBC/SQL backend--I think--goes unmatched 'til this day.

There are many things I cram in a spreadsheet these days that would be way more flexible if they were instead built on a quick and dirty Access DB.

If there are equivalent tools out there, please, let me know.

>you could put a shared MDB file out on a Novell network >share and have 30 concurrent users with no server app at >all, users just doubled clicked the MDB

You could be describing myself. However... I beg to differ on it's scalability... There were 'issues' with the 2.0 Jet engine when accessing MDB files on network shares that would often result in 'missing data'. Lots of fun. (Lots of work up-sizing to actual SQL back-ends as well though)

Oh I didn't say it was without problems, but it did mostly work , mostly...

Once I started learning SQL server and VB5 for real client server apps I never looked back, but then you had to go find a reporting engine too.

Crystal reports. Shudder.

I hated it so bad, I eventually took it off my resume.

Crystal Reports worked great for me. Even had ActiveX and ASP versions. Only problem was Seagate Software was in Canada and CR was quite buggy. So I got docked in my paycheck for calling Canada. It is SAS now I think.

Lotus Approach also did the same as Access.

I've seen Access macros to generate reports, called from the command-line, as a "reporting engine". It was a rickety death-trap but it worked...

Modern-day Access: Filemaker Pro was the contemporary competitor and still lives and has usergroups today; Airtables and similar (all SQL-based form managers) are the modern options.

Unfortunately it silently fails.

Years ago I worked for a company that claimed to have largest Filemaker Pro database in the southern hemisphere. One day there was some sort of disk issue and filemaker silently failed, then for months it kept pretending that everything was fine, it just wasn't writing to disk. This lasted until a power outage one day when the company discovered it had lost months of customer data, no backups of course, the backup system was working fine but there was no new information being written.

Data loss isn't forgivable, especially in the non-technical user space that filemaker is aiming for.

I'd put that on the DBAs. Once a week they should have been pulling down backups and testing for problems. They'd have also discovered the problem with the backups themselves.

90+% of the good use cases for filemaker are at places with no DBA's, it's meant to be a database tool for non-technical people and small businesses. If you had DBA's they'd just want to lock it down and eliminate the remaining 10% anyway.

If a company is claiming to have the largest database in the Southern Hemisphere, they'd have in-house developers (who double as FM dbas).

I'd be interested in knowing who the company was, and the metric they used to judge their database size. I worked on one that was 4GB data and >40GB binary files (photos, documents). Interestingly, when all the data was removed and the file was optimised it came to less than 2MB.

Still, someone should have been checking the backups on a regular basis, because anything can fail.

FileMaker, in my experience, attracts a certain smug developer who simply cannot believe that there are more industrial-strength database systems and that FileMaker can't solve every possible problem in the world. Access devs, at least, don't seem to have that particular quirk.

It's because they were all Mac users -- in the early days it was an Apple (Claris) product.

Fun fact: it’s still owned by Apple

Another fun fact: The company just rebranded itself to Claris again this summer.

I wouldn't rag on it or Access too much because it serves/d a purpose: app and data design for less technical users who are busy doing a million other things. I supported several dozen FMP apps at Stanford Student Housing (R&DE) as it was easy for analysts to make something quickly and worked at the scale needed. Later, they used proper databases, reporting, and app-ish tools. FMP ran on a half dozen early Xserves which used goofy, consumer-grade parts inconsistently while looking Apple over-designed.

I'm not talking-down either one. They're both great tools for their purpose. I've used Access a ton.

I guess I'm talking about a cultural difference. It's been my experience that Access devs know when a problem is mismatched for Access (and move to storing data in SQL Server, etc). FileMaker devs seem to press on even when it's clear that the platform isn't capable of supporting their needs.

As one anecdote (of several): I support an instance of a FileMaker application w/ several 500MB+ "FMP" files, each of which take _hours_ to "integrity check" when the "FileMaker Server" process crashes unexpectedly. We talked to the dev about putting at least some of the data into an RDBMS (MSSQL, Postgres, etc) and they scoffed at the idea. It simply didn't occur to their mind that the platform might not be a good fit for the purpose.

“(Almost) the same SQL as the big boy toys" was the most redeeming quality of Access. It somehow managed to be beginner accessible and productive without dumbing down, reinventing the wheel skillset lock-in.

Had Microsoft gone for a more custom interface like Filemaker instead of just nicely packaging up more general tools, my entire life might be very different and probably not better, even 15 years after having touched Access for the last time.

> DB, Gui framework and printable report generator all in one sharing the same language front to back, top to bottom.

Printable reports is so 90's. Back then you printed reports and shared reports on paper. In meetings everyone gets a printed copy of the report. Today web is the way to share reports, and you project reports on to a big screen in meetings.

Isn't Airtable considered like modern day Access?

Except it requires your IT department to contract it, which makes it a non-starter for most "shadow IT" uses where Access excels.

Not to mention, Access won't randomly break because Microsoft isn't likely to Move Fast and Break Things or suddenly get acquihired. And it will work over LAN even when you lose your Internet access. And, all your data - including schemas and forms you've made - is in actual file.

Plus, it's the normal shitty SaaS model for something that isn't enterprisey enough. So it's easy pickings for budget cuts.

Access is like a cockroach. It never dies as long as some Microsoft stuff is still around. The only thing that will kill it is subscription licensing -- Microsoft eventually take it away for Azure AirTableClone.

Access running on your pc is also there because of your IT department.

Access running on your PC is because it comes bundled with MS Office suite, which is installed for you to have Word, Excel, PowerPoint and perhaps Outlook available. It's a great thing Microsoft didn't make it easy to unbundle them all, otherwise lot of places with Access wouldn't have it.

Does Airtable still require internet access? That's a non-starter for many businesses which only have intermittent internet access.

really? I mean, I get the aircraft carrier examples above but I reckon most business have internet access now. I reckon (in the UK) loads of one man bands run everything off their phones. They're probably more likely to have access to the internet than MS Access.

Yes, really. There are still many places that do not have internet access, some of them on purpose. e.g. military installations.

I have played a little with it but I found Access much more powerful and easier to use than Airtable.

I've only played with Access once in Uni so it's a bit hard to compare for me, but it sounds pretty similar.

I use it as my own version of Shadow IT for my wife's business when im just too time constrained to make her proper web apps to do stuff, and she's too reluctant to spend any money on things, I just whip up a solution in Airtable. She has a CRM I made her for managing her students and their balances. Works well and was super fast to put together.

It's pretty crazy capable as Airtable has various kinds of built in functions for math and string manipulation, plus it can do various kinds of relations, joins, aggregates and rollups. Heck the resulting table even exposes an API!

The only thing I can't really seem to do is business rule validation stuff that a typical CRUD app would contain.

i have no affiliation but like the product -- try https://airtable.com/

FileMaker Pro?

Yup. I built a networked invoice database with FileMaker Pro (2.1??) on Macs at a university in the 90's. It was still there when I went back a few years later, running on an ancient Mac server with an external hard disk duct taped to the top. It had just enough functionality that the department could keep track of how the monthly budget was going while the month went on, as the official Oracle Financials system could only tell you once it was too late.

Later, I realised that it had a Y2K bug in it, but oh well.

Exactly. I didn't understand the might of FileMaker Pro until I saw university employees at my alma mater working with it.

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