[bombcar]

We've really kind of "lost" the end-user database. I played with an older version of Access and was blown away by how user-friendly and capable it was compared to just doing things in spreadsheets.

Losing Access and similar things has lead to Salesforce being a billion dollar company; when it's basically AccessOnline™.

[082349872349872]

Looks like FileMaker is still around, or do they somehow not count as end-user db?

[burningChrome]

I used to work at a bike shop where they went 100% Apple products. All the POS machines were macs. The entire company was mainly run with Filemaker Pro, which is pretty impressive when you think at the time, the company had over 10 shops.

They had one IT guy that managed everything and I remember him saying it was either going to be Apple or some Linux distro and by using Apple for all their stuff, it greatly reduced the amount spent on tons of other IT stuff that he would have to deal with if it were Windows based.

[vondur]

We have a "system" that I have to support that is used here in a Higher Education institution. It's relatively cheap for EDU pricing.

[fzzzy]

It's still around, but do you ever hear of anyone using it? For some reason that style of ui has fallen out of favor. I have fond memories of FileMaker.

[kstrauser]

It costs like $500 per user per year now. I'm sure that doesn't help.

[fzzzy]

Ouch...

[breadwinner]

There are new alternatives that are basically AccessOnline™, see https://visualdb.com

[bonzini]

Many of them are paid by the number of records, you basically cannot do many to many relationships.

[moomin]

Access was powerful and dominated the market for a while but there were two problems: 1) it was kind of bad from a pure dev perspective compared to SQL Server b) non-pure devs made horrible broken apps and eventually ended up calling in the pure devs, who moved them to SQL Server.

[flyinghamster]

Not only that, but JET (the database engine) also integrated into Visual Basic and C++. I was using MDBs in applications long before SQLite3 became a thing.

[pjmlp]

Access is still around, the problem is that it isn't on the basic Office offering, and not everyone is going to give 180 euros for a single product.

[zie]

LibreOffice has one built-in. I don't know anyone that uses it though, which is sad, because it seems to work fine.

It seems we have decided to go the SaaS route instead and you get online only things that sort of play at Access, but "with cloud".

[jdougan]

But that can be done better. I miss DabbleDB.

https://youtu.be/MCVj5RZOqwY

[zie]

OMG, I adore how it did foreign key relationships! Pure magic. I want!

[jdougan]

Ask twitter/x. They bought smallthought, trendly and dabbledb, probably as an aquihire.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1440928

[zie]

Agreed on acquihire as most likely purchase reason.

[the_arun]

> We've really kind of "lost" the end-user database.

How? Aren't Google & Excel Spreadsheets end user databases?

[bombcar]

People use spreadsheets as databases, but they're really not.

If you've never used a tool like Access, it's hard to explain just how powerful it really is for ordinary people.

[gmueckl]

This. Access is a very powerful package to quickly slap down a structured data model with data entry forms and report generators. The benefit is that it automatically guarantees consistency in data entry and processing. Spreadsheets are notoriously bad at enforcing structure.

[umeshunni]

Yeah - people basically had entire applications written in Access - think very simple point-of-sale systems, record keeping tools etc. The downside of course, is that, it ran on a single computer and there wasn't a concept of multi-user systems (or maybe there was and I just wasn't aware of it).

In some ways, it's a hark back to the day of a really 'thick' client that was a server, middleware and client all in one.

[gmueckl]

Access scales from being a one process all-in-one solution to multiple processes sharing the same database file and also to a separate ODBC-connected database engine with Access as a frontend. At least some 20 years ago, there was an assistant to automatically migrate an Access database to a split Access/SQL Server setup.

Looks like there are some additional configurations that MS actively supports: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/ways-to-share-an-...

If I had to throw together a reasonably robust data entry form in a time crunch today and could connect to the DB engine via ODBC, I'd probably still use Access for that.