As luck would have it, though, I landed a software job working for someone who had spent the past ten years developing more than a dozen Access applications. I resigned myself to the fact that I would not be able to write software for a living. When I left the Army in 2007, my wife and I moved back to my small hometown in northeast Pennsylvania. I have been developing and maintaining Access applications my entire professional programming career.

That's a difficult question for me to answer. This line in particular has been haunting me, 'from a moral and ethical standpoint, as a developer, are you truly looking out for your users’ best interests, or simply your own, by continuing to promote and use Microsoft Access?' ( emphasis added) This is analogous to the new “.docx” and “.xlsx” formats in Word and Excel, which are also incompatible with the pre-2007 versions of these programs.I've been thinking about Daniel's post for the past 24 hours. This new format supports more complex data types, but unfortunately is not compatible with prior versions of the Access software.

With the release of Access 2007, the database file format changed from the previous “.mdb” to “.accdb”. With each release of Office, Microsoft has also included a newer version of Access, each of which includes new or updated features. The software was fine while working with small databases but in larger files there was the danger of data corruption. For these, Microsoft offers its SQL Server database engine.Īccess was first released as version 1.0 in November 1992. It is not suitable for larger, enterprise-level databases. Access is well-suited for creating small databases such as those used by single departments. The Access Jet engine supports most database features, such as referential integrity, row-level locking and multiuser support with up to 255 concurrent user connections. This is partly due to its easy-to-use graphical interface, as well as its interoperability with other applications and platforms such as Microsoft’s own SQL Server database engine and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). Access is used for both small and large database deployments.

What does microsoft access do