[baconner]

To be fair its been years since I've touched access so maybe its much better now than it was. Also perhaps I'm blaming the paintbrush when I should also be blaming the painter which is going on regarding PowerPoint in this thread.

That said I've had to unscrew a number of spaghetti coded access based shadow systems of the "why are you running your business on this!?" type in the past and I do think these tools are to an extent responsible for leading users into the wrong paths. PowerPoint for instance guides users right into bullet point hell. You can create beautiful presentations with it but it leads you in the wrong direction from the start.

The danger of access (and excel) IMO is they encourage users who don't regularly build software to create complex systems without good tools to test and verify what they're doing and in a totally disconnected fashion. They also lack an audit trail which enables all sorts of I'll advised and sometimes unethical number fudging. Generally speaking I consider numbers out of these systems suspect until I understand how they work. as long as they're simple its manageable but they get complex quickly with no control and no record of how they got the data to a given state. This disconnection bears similar risks as a developer who goes for months without checking in code only to drop their masterpiece in on code cut day and inevitably shoot everyone in the foot.

I sympathize with people whose choice is between building a shadow system and having to deal with a Oracle's billing department (shudder). I just think there can be better solutions between "user is totally at the mercy of n thousand $/hr report writing consultants" and "user is forced to code their own disconnected data system without a net." In that situation I'd probably be recommending option #2 as well but with a please KISS warning.

Every time I read about a company making a big public mistake because they made an error in a user developed shadow system it breaks my heart a little.

I suppose its as much or more of a company culture and procedural issue than it is a tooling issue but the tools we make are responsible in some part. I think we can do better without throwing user empowerment completely out the window or spending big money to get a simple report. I think this is the most important ongoing challange in business intelligence (despite how cool "big data" is at the moment).