Microsoft Access 2013 Tutorials
Welcome / Access Alternatives
Subtitles of the Movie (Microsoft Access 2013 / Welcome / Access Alternatives)
Now this video falls into that category of helping you look smart in the workplace okay? I want to talk about some Access alternatives. There's a lot of times that you'll go into a company on a new job or you'll start to deal with some other database administrators and you'll mention Access and they'll make little faces or they'll kind of snicker a little bit or you know make some kind of little childish noise. Because they don't consider Access to be a serious database. Well Access is a serious database and it does have it's strengths and it does have it's limitations. So I just want to kind of help you to understand those here. First of all let's talk about some Access's strengths. It's a mature stable product. It is built specifically for very small to mid-size databases. Next thing the user interface is built into the product so you don't have to go out and hire a .NET developer to build a customized interface, anything like that. You just kind of open it up, start running it, build your data tables, set the relationships and then create a little form, start loading the data and manipulating it. Access 2013 by the way improves this user interface stuff dramatically, you're going to like what you see here. Next Access is an excellent choice when concurrent users are under 30. Now not 30 years of age but when the total number of concurrent users is under 30. And the farther under 30 it is the more you're going to like Access. This was not designed for a massive number of people to connect at the same time and start changing data and retrieving data and adding data and so forth. Okay. Now Access also has it's weaknesses. Performance and response time starts to suffer, kind of on a graduating scale as concurrency increases. So the more people that start to connect Access and work with it, the more you're going to start to get complaints about slow response time and that sort of thing. Next Access as a database product is not as secure as database products like SQL Server, Oracle and some of those things. But it's a whole lot less expensive than those. Okay. Those are larger, more serious enterprise database applications. Now how about a little Access reality check here. It is a great product. Now it's not a silver bullet solution but I don't know of a product that is. You can't just you know in, in any meeting every problem that comes up, you raise your hand and say, oh we'll use Access for that. Well we got another problem over here, well we'll use Access for that. No. Access is great for small to mid-size databases. Now like all applications and solutions Access's biggest I don't know how you say Access with plural, Access's, Access's biggest single limitation is the developers experience and how that developer implements it. In other words if you don't build the house very well it's not going to be a well built house. And if you don't design a good database and develop a good database then you're not going to have a good database and that's certainly is not an Access problem, that is a developer problem. So the better you get as a developer, the better Access is going to be. Okay. But again what isn't? Take SQL, take Oracle, if you build a bad database with it then guess what you're going to have a bad database. Good database design is crucial just like always with any database. Now we're not going to go very deep at all into good database design here. Neither will any of Access's Help Files or anything like that, that's kind of your responsibility. If you find yourself in the Access world go out there and grab some books on good database design and just kind of read through them. Then what happens when I outgrow Access? Well you'll know you're outgrowing Access when your data storage starts to exceed 2 gigabytes. Now there's work arounds and things you can do to take care of this but around 2 gigabytes is a good signal to start looking for something a little bigger and better. I mentioning it again when your concurrent users start to exceed 20 and they start to approach 30, it's probably a good time to start looking around for something besides Access. Or if your response time with 15 people is just intolerable and people just can't use it because it's so slow. Now where do you go next? When you've decided Access is not quite cutting it anymore, I got to something else. Well there's Microsoft SQL Server, this is Microsoft's enterprise level database. It is expensive, there's no user interface built-in custom development is required. You'll have to some .NET developer, some Java developer, somebody has got to build you a custom interface to work with that data. Storage and response time with SQL Server is limited only by hardware and of course your checkbook. And this is on some of the editions, other editions there are some upper limits but you're not going to hit them anytime soon. Next is MySQL. MySQL is a free open source database product that's out there. It's an excellent tool. They do things slightly different than SQL Server but a lot of it's out there and you owe it to yourself to take a look at it. Oracle is the 900 pound gorilla in the database market. It's even more expensive than SQL Server but it is considered by many to be the very large enterprise database solution. Now Microsoft is closing that gap dramatically with SQL Server. A lot of Microsoft people would drag me out into the parking lot and beat me for implying that Oracle could be better in any way but that's kind of the way reality out in the real world is shaking out. So anyway that's some of the alternatives to Access. So when you're standing around the water cooler and you want to look smart and you're talking about Access or you're talking Access is starting to get a little slow, you'll know what they're talking about and you'll know some names to bring up.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Microsoft Access 2013 |
| Author: | Mark Long |
| SKU: | 34405 |
| ISBN: | 978-1-61866-090-9 |
| Release Date: | 2013-02-01 |
| Duration: | 7 hrs / 89 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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