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    <p>The problem with replacing Access - and replacing Access is <strong>the</strong> problem which stops me in the vast majority of cases recommending a move to Ubuntu or SUSE desktop to my business clients - is not that Access is widely used for its database facilities: it's not except with the most Micky Mouse of user-written departmental applications which are relatively trivial to re-code. The problem is the medium sized applications where the data was migrated long ago to the corporate SQL Server.</p> <p>These are a nightmare. They're often badly written (I've acquired a fair few to administer over the years) and encapsulate reams of business logic. Recoding them in <strong>anything</strong> is generally quoted at a couple of man-months at the best - usually twice or three times that, and it's unusual for a department of the size these are found in to have the budget to support that. Moreover although the arrival of AJAX and good desktop-like controls has meant that this is at least now possible in theory, in practice these are of then massively integrated with the rest of the MS Office desktop and virtually impossible to disentangle with out users seeing a drop in usability in the short to medium term - which is a show stopper in itself.</p> <p>I really do not know what the solution is, apart from the slow replacement of creating new systems with other methods and hoping for the gradual demise of existing apps. Trouble is I think Access could well be the Cobol of the 1990s - it'll be around for ever supporting legacy apps because it's too costly to rewrite from scratch.</p> <p>As an aside, does anyone else coming from a non-Access traditional Win32 coding background have the experience of finding that the standard of coding in even professionally written Access apps is generally below average? Although superficial (but important) stuff like formatting and variable names are generally fine I find over and over again that program structuring is poor. I know that this may often be because these apps have grown like Topsy, and VBA really isn't conducive to good coding anyway, but even allowing for these factors things generally seem worse than one might expect.</p>
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    1. POWhat will we do after Access?
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    1. COCan't say I've ever seen a well written Access application or a good/valid use of them where it couldn't be better handled and/or cheaper to build a web app.
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      1. USJustin Yost
    2. COThen you've not seen much in the way of complex Access applications. To be sure you're typical departmental written Access app can be moved to the web easy-osy, but it's not uncommon to find more strategic apps with hundred of forms/reports and 10K lines of code plus.
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    3. COI think the reason probably is that a fair portion of the better developers would have written the app in Real Visual Basic (VB2 to VB6) and primarily used Access for the database (maybe with some querydefs and reports.)
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