[topspin]

> Feel free to laugh at me but I often miss MS Access layout tools

Hell, I miss Paradox. In DOS. There was a direct relationship between the tables and the UI so you got CRUD as a side effect.

I built several real application using it, but the best was a true "enterprise" application used across three facilities. The "backend" was a Netware file system and the key to making it scale was to cache necessary data locally and batch writes to shared tables. Contention had to be avoided, not because Paradox couldn't multiplex readers and writers, but because the performance was so poor.

It was still spinning when I moved on. Have no idea how long they maintained it, but I'll bet whatever they replaced it with cost an order of magnitude more. It was a part of every dollar of revenue that outfit earned employing ~1000 people.