grantmeaname wrote:Access is another huge one; it's all my work uses for databases. OO Base doesn't even pretend it czn work with .mdb files, and it's a good thing, because that might be a disaster. As a matter of fact, Access 2003 is the sole reason I have a virtual machine at all.
Access databases are a blight upon the database world. Access is a toy DBMS that MS and thousands of developers have coerced over the years into doing things it was never designed to do, with predictably horrible results.
It's not like MS can't produce a decent database engine; MS SQL Server is good! Too bad Access had already become so entrenched by the time MS started pushing MSDE (the stripped down version of SQL Server) and the subsequent SQL Server Express products as the DB engine of choice for desktop and small client-server deployments. (Smart move on their part even if it was too little, too late to save us from Access Hell; MSDE is likely the reason that Open Source RDBMSes like MySQL and PostgreSQL didn't gain more of a foothold on Windows.)