Make Access harder to use.

  • Thread starter Thread starter The Male Person
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The Male Person

Make this program more difficult to use so that people who
don't understand the relational model won't be able to use
Access easily. There are far too many bad databases out
there because of Access.
 
An excellent suggestion.I suggest we not stop there, as we can do the
world a lot of good by extending this approach. To address the problem
of so many bad people in the world...

make penises more difficult to use.

Have a good one,

Will
 
Frankly, I'd rather contribute to the newsgroups and try to help people
learn how to work with Access.

But, just for your information, I've seen a number of
not-quite-fully-relational databases that served well the need for which
they were intended. Indeed, I've seen some that were far from relational
that "did the job". In fact, it wasn't all that long ago that there were not
any relational databases on the desktop, so all personal database
applications were not relational -- and believe me, if you every used any of
those pre-relational, pre-visual-interface databases, you know that they
_were_ harder to use.

It's not _necessary_ that your table structure be relational in order to
make use of Access. And, who are you to say that a database or other
application is "bad" simply because it does not meet _your_ standard of
correctness?

That said, one of the things I try to help people with is learning something
about the relational model -- not because it is necessary for all the simple
things they may do, but because it will make the more complex things they
may want to try a great deal easier.

Have a good day.
 
-----Original Message-----
Frankly, I'd rather contribute to the newsgroups and try to help people
learn how to work with Access.
Click to expand...

What a great spirit. Help people learn a technology that
contributes heavily to the continuation of an ill-wrought
understanding of what a database is supposed to be like.

The problem with a lot of the databases I've seen in Access
is not that they don't adhere to my standards, but they
don't adhere to standards at all. How can a product that
allows this sort of design be useful in a fahsion when
designing what are intended to be scalable databases?

If you want to keep Access around, then I think another
approach would be to teach the end-users the proper niche
of Access--if they want to make something that just gets
the job done, that's all well and good, these same people
shouldn't make their get-the-job-done databases turn into
mission-critical, large scale applications.

I should revise my initial criticism of Access. perhaps
it's just too tempting for users who don't understand basic
concepts like referential integrity and normalization to go
all-out and make their business run on a badly designed
database.

quote:
It's not _necessary_ that your table structure be
relational in order to make use of Access. And, who are you
to say that a database or other application is "bad" simply
because it does not meet _your_ standard of correctness?

It becomes bad when they want it to scale. Or get any real
work done.
 
Right one male person. The problem with Access, and other
MS products for that matter, is the way in which the user
thinks she or he has gained an "expertise" in designing
databases. "Access in 24 hours" does not make one a
database programmer by any means yet the "databases"
created by these 'expert' access users are used to support
infrastructures of critical data and projects. Having a
database programmer of this quality is _not_ better than
having none at all.

Have a nice day.
 
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