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Jul 22The Contract Access Upgrade
by in Feature Articles on 2022-08-02Microsoft Access represents an "attractive nuisance". It's a powerful database and application development platform designed to enable end users to manage their own data. Empowering users is, in principle, good. But the negative side effect is that you get people who aren't application developers developing applications, which inevitably become business critical.
A small company developed an Access Database thirty years ago. It grew, it mutated, it got ported from each Access version to the next. Its tendrils extended outwards, taking over more and more of the business's processes. The ability to maintain and modify the database decayed, updates and bugfixes got slower to make, the whole system got slower. But it limped along roughly at the speed the business required… and then Larry, the user who developed, retired.