My >15-year journey with MS Access

At the beginning of my money mining way (as program developer of course) with MS Access I programmed a few applications for wholesale trade enterprises.

Then, for about four years, I was working (developed and maintained) on a very interesting and even exciting multi-user system for complex accounting of stock market operation. MS Access was used for creating business logic and interface on client side. Database was on MS SQL. The first working version went to production after four months from start of developing. Some months later this back office system was integrated with front office system and external market and stock exchange data sources via API.

Then I created a management accounting system – small, flexible and convenient, also on MS Access.

Next I created a data mart (DM) system that receives information from the corporate data warehouse and other sources in a one of top 10 Russian banks. This DM exceeded expectations of customer. Reporting from this DM began to be used in several departments (although it was planned to use only for one department). After a few years of using DM in the list of users was registered about 100 people.

In the large companies, applications on MS Access have the right to life as satellites for enterprise systems. And I had to develop or modify such satellites.

In my developing history MS Access has also played role as a back office part in the automation of the online shop. This back office was integrated with the front office (web site) with supplier’s data (prices, stocks etc.), with marketing side (Google Adwords, Yandex.Direct etc.) and with delivery service via API.

By the way, on MS Access was written home accounting, foreign language training program, time accounting program, private investor securities accounting program, etc.

Nowadays, I position MS Access as the ideal tool for quickly creating database solutions for small amounts of data (less then 100Mb, if more then MS SQL is better), as well as a great client (in client-server architecture) to work with large volumes of data.