On Wed, 10 Sep 2003 09:15:53 +0100, Bob Walkden wrote: > Despite all its faults, Access is an extremely useful > prototyping tool.
That I'll agree with. Prototype to your heart's content. And it's OK for small databases with low turnover in the data, if you don't mind taking customer calls because Microsoft changed something between Access 97 and Access 2k (or something like that). But I've used many different versions of the Jet engine over the years and, based on my experience, it's nothing but trouble for (a) medium size and up databases, (b) databases with high turnover in the records or their contents, (c) databases with BLOBs, or (d) almost any application that you're charging people money for. I've probably spent more time fixing corrupted databases or trying to figure out incompatibilities between different versions of the Jet engine than I have writing the code in the first place. And I'm not a novice, either at programming or relational databases. I haven't used the Access UI builder/environment in many moons because I can generally get what I want faster in C/C++ than in the environment. Maybe I'm biased, in part, by the types of apps that I've worked on with databases in general and Access in particular. To me, you don't go from small to medium sized until you're talking about 100k records or so. Large doesn't start until several million records. And SELECTs without WHEREs are unheard of in the apps I've worked on ... the result sets are too large. TTYL, DougF KG4LMZ
