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Technology news and Jobs 
The Linux distillery Open source, the Access slayer
The Linux distillery Open source, the Access slayer | Open source, the Access slayer |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Wednesday, 06 February 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 3 Access suffers many problems simply by virtue of its implicit nature as a personal, single- or low-user, desktop database system. The former lead developer at a software house with a commercial product produced in Access confided to me the bulk of questions coming in to the help desk were problems with Access itself – version conflicts, missing runtimes, file or folder security settings, linking problems, database corruptions, mucked-up autonumber fields, a 2Gb file limit and more.I have strong views on Microsoft Access databases, formed after many, many years of fixing flaws in Access databases, and perhaps more importantly in developing software using professional tools and relational database servers. I’ll make a potentially inflammatory comment: I fully accept Access is great for home users who may not have, nor should they require, deep technical ability. However I will be so bold as to say it should never ever be considered a viable platform for important business data and nor should any company ever try and flog off a product developed as an Access database. In fact, the latter simply makes the company look cheap and unskilled. A commercial Access product is as pleasant as a blacksmith’s armpit. There’s a reason why a home user chooses Access: it’s available and it’s cheap and it has a low barrier to entry. What does it say about a commercial software house which can not afford, nor knows how to use, Visual Studio or Java or C/C++ or SQL Server or Postgres or Oracle or any of a myriad of other products? Let’s see the feedback I get to that! In fact, thanks to the realm of open source, price is not even an issue. Here’s where open source rises up and if all is right with the world will sound the death knoll of Access. Here’s three totally free, totally open source, highly supported and extremely powerful database systems which all completely knock the wind out of Access. Firebird Fiebird is a stable product, with version 2.0.3 recently released and 2.1 in testing. It runs on Windows and Linux platforms and offers high performance and concurrency. Firebird is not short of acclaim: it was the Sourceforge project of the month for December 2007, and also won Community Choice Awards in the categories of Best project for the enterprise and Best user support. The product has an excellent history: it has been used in production since 1981 and was formerly released by Borland – the makers of Delphi – as the proprietary database Interbase. In 2000 Borland released the source code and this was adopted by, and is being enhanced and maintained by, the Firebird project. What else? Read on! CONTINUED
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