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Comment by fpoling | Hacker News Reader

25 years ago a small Norwegian company in oil industri replaced a big Excel that it were using to manage its inventory with Access database and discovered that they have like extra 200K USD in equipment.

The reason for the saving was enforcement of constrains in various Access tables so a subtle entry error in Excel was discovered.

The transition to DB file was done by a single person in a month who had not worked previously with DB (however he was young and talented programmer I must admit).

And the Access DB in a single file with its UI was quite similar to Excel so guys maintaining it quickly learned it and really liked it.

So it is still puzzles me why such single file DB with nice UI are not more popular? Why it is always Excel?

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Someone builds an access database and it works for a bit but then they leave and no-one else knows how it works so they start exporting the data to excel instead. Access is all about restrictions (the form has these fields; the data is structured like so; input will be validated by these rules) ... Restrictions deliver some value but are brittle - its about as hard to maintain as any other custom built app would be.

Access was much easier to get started with than any other similarly capable database product, last time I checked in 2017.

as an anecdote, my own mother, who studied french in university and works in education, has built access DBs for places she's worked before. It seems its a very approachable and beginner friendly UI for non-programmers, somehow.

Its easy to get started, but modifying one made by someone else? You've got to really think like a programmer.

Because Microsoft decided to kill/neglect access and Visual Basic... for reasons?

> why such single file DB with nice UI are not more popular?

Because it needs skills that often aren't immediately available whereas a lot of people have enough Excel experience to lash up even a moderately complex spreadsheet.

At many places there's also some nasty politics around siloing where a database is an IT System so it has to be owned by the centralized IT organization, operated by a DBA team, have a budget, be audited by security, etc. and half of those groups look down on Access and want to architect for job security by picking some Oracle/SAP product where even if you have an unlimited budget you are looking at years of guaranteed delay before you can use it with a significant risk of failure.

In a fair number of places that I've worked the finance and IT departments have a fairly substantial level of enmity which also discourages use of anything which involves them. Meanwhile, everyone still needs to do their jobs and there's a business analyst with decent Excel chops who will have something you can use “temporarily”. A few years pass, then a few more, and now everything lives in Excel as the calcified scar tissue of broken official processes…

> At many places there's also some nasty politics around siloing where a database is an IT System so it has to be owned by the centralized IT organization, operated by a DBA team, have a budget, be audited by security, etc. and half of those groups look down on Access and want to architect for job security by picking some Oracle/SAP product where even if you have an unlimited budget you are looking at years of guaranteed delay before you can use it with a significant risk of failure.

A space seemingly ripe for Line Of Business Applications As A Service: LOBAAAS :-)

TBH, the whole SaaS took off because of the ability for individual departments to just get their resources using nothing but a company credit card.

Excel is really easy to use for smaller data collection and manipulation. There's no input validation, signing and other complicated design decisions needed to start an excel spreadsheet. There's alot of tools out there for easy integration. So its not something you need to switch away from once you have rather static requirements. Billions are just numbers that fit inside a cell just fine until someone complains.

And then once you need actual calling Access lags far behind even MySQL.

FWIW, having a human regularly count the equipment would have also uncovered the error. As well as other interesting reasons that discrepancies arise, such as theft. Always important remember that these systems are tools, not the truth, and have to be reconciled to the truth on a regular basis.

Simple counting would not uncover the error. The company was required by support contracts to have some equipment in store in case of failures to quickly replace what failed. And the error was related to not updating in one Excel sheet information that a particular long-term contract was replaced with different one requiring less equipment on storage after updating another sheet. The Access DB with the support of enforcing complex cross-table constrains detected that.

> The transition to DB file was done by a single person in a month

If Deloitte is going to do this it will take 3 years, take about 20 people and cost tens of millions.

To be fair, you can define value constraints in Excel as well.

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