Microsoft Access
Microsoft Access is a Windows database program. It gives the programmer a visual interface for creating attractive user interfaces to update and retrieve data from the database.
Advantages
- Easy interface creation: Access makes it easy to create interfaces for updating and viewing your data, which will save you tons of time as you use the database.
Disadvantages
- Not for the Web: Access is not appropriate when Web software will need to interact with the database—to add or edit data, or to extract and display data.
- Not for large databases: Access also works less well for larger databases with, say, 50,000 records or more, because it will slow down and its data may become corrupted. One could get around this size limitation by using Access as a front end to a more powerful database server like Microsoft SQL Server, but the cost would be far greater.
Choosing Access
Access is great for simple databases that just a few people need to update and access, within a single physical office.
As noted above, databases that interact with Web software or that are relatively large will not work well in Access.
