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by mathattack 4895 days ago
I love the Access analogy. It burned me quite a few times in prior lives, when every project started with, "Let's build an access database." Ultimately it's a tradeoff in abstraction and usability.
1 comments

i actually doubt the problems with access are really that bad - sure you outgrow it eventually, but you'd be surprised at what its capable of.

Often the real underlying cause is that a business owner with little to no programming knowledge makes something which works ok, but is architectually wrong. For example, bad table structure/relationships. Or after a while, they want to 'put their app online', and asks a poor intern to convert it.

This is true too. Sometimes screens are designed by people who don't think in terms of relational tables, and then the data eventually gets messed up.