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Comment by spockz | Hacker News Reader

Isn’t this exactly what Microsoft access was invented for? I’ve seen technical but non-cs people built magical things in forms by (or views). And when access got the ability to talk to MSSQL it really blew up. The quintessential low-code environment. I wonder why it never caught on.

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I was hired a couple decades ago to replace a Microsoft Access system that was written by a non-software engineer and was running an entire company with around 50 users with all sorts of complex forms.

It got a little too big and I rewrote it as a C# desktop application talking to a SQL Server, but it was impressive what this person was able to create with no real programming knowledge and just Microsoft Access.

I like this comment.

A lot of comments on HN display disrespect for people using tools like Excel and Access instead of 'doing things properly'.

You acknowledge that the person who built what you replaced was working under constraints and created a system that ran a 50-person company.

This is exactly what I meant. For real world situations and when you don’t have SWE “to do a proper” job you can get very far fast with just access. Especially if you hook it up to a running db instead of using the internal one.

Which gains did you or the users get when rewriting to C#? What were the downsides?

> Which gains did you or the users get when rewriting to C#? What were the downsides?

The gains were performance. The MS Access application was not backed by a proper database, I forget the exact setup but it was more of just a shared MDB file over the network? Whatever Access was capable of at the time. There were contention/locking issues and all the other sorts of problems you'd expect given the setup. My memory of it is a bit hazy, but I know it was lacking a true database outside of its own MDB format.

Funny story, after the rewrite the software was so succesful internally that we decided to start selling it, and it became one of the industry leaders. The person who wrote it originally was highly knowledgable in their field, and I happened to have decent enough programming knowledge. The two put together ended up with something special.

Microsoft essentially abandoned it. They hoped that a bunch of random Azure services would be its replacement, but they're too scattered and incomplete compared to Access.

It's not abandoned. Access still has an engineering team working on it, and that team still goes to conferences to talk with their users. Source: I work in the same org as them, and ate lunch daily with a few of them before the pandemic hit.

Sigh.

Silverlight had positive sounding blog posts, etc... right up until its official death.

These megacorps never officially announce a product's demise, not while they can sell it. You have to read between the lines.

Access as an idea was awesome.

The execution sucked because Access is/was a terrible database. Poor data integrity, really low limits on the DB size, etc.

I think if Access was as good as SQLlite, it would have really taken off.

My theory is that InfoPath killed Access. People wanted to use the "easy interface for Nancy in Marketing to submit a purchasing request" and got bogged down with XPath and SharePoint/ActiveDirectory fuckery, and weren't quite to the level where they could grasp MSSQL (or IT had disabled this or that, forcing the one ambitious "computer guy" in Finance to cludge together something with the tools available). Using Access would have been ideal but it was a time when MS was pushing things like InfoPath and Sway and the like, and simultaneously there were issues with concurrency and "omg macro virus" cybersecurity focus. Access got better but it was already tainted.

Access is a bunch less flexible than excel. You need to plan how to query data more carefully and as soon as you want to do something weird, you basically need to dump your query result into excel anyway.

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