Access or SQL Server? Choosing a Database (part 1 of 2) - Reasons not to Choose SQL Server

Access or SQL Server? Choosing a Database (part 1 of 2) - Reasons not to Choose SQL Server

SQL Server is a powerful database: it supports multiple users with ease, and is designed to cope with databases with millions of records. However, you do pay a price for this robustness ...

In the belief that the easiest way to evaluate software is to concentrate on its down side (the software vendor will amply fill you in on the plus points), here are three and a half reasons why you might NOT choose SQL Server as a database application.

Written by Techie People, for Techie People

The main user interface to SQL Server (the place in which you create tables and views) is called SQL Server Management Studio. While this does let you do everything you need to, there are few concessions to usability or modernity. Here are a couple of examples.

Suppose you've got two tables: members of staff and the departments they work in. Each member of staff record stores the department id of the department they work for. In Access you can use a lookup wizard to tell Access to display the department name, but store the corresponding id (so you see "Accounts" even though the data stored is actually the department number, 13); in SQL Server it's up to you to know the department numbers, since combo boxes/dropdowns like this are so hard to create.

When creating a database diagram in SQL Server, you connect two fields together. As you move tables around, the lines joining the fields (the "relationships") don't follow with them, so it can appear as if you had created relationships between completely different pairs of fields. Irritations like are hard to forgive in the 21st century!

Microsoft put huge amounts of work into trying to make Access easy to use; it's a shame that they've never invested the same effort in improving the usability of SQL Server.

Need to Learn SQL

SQL Server uses a variant of the SQL Structured Query Language called T-SQL or Transact-SQL for its queries (although you can write views without using SQL). Whereas you can easily survive using Access without knowing SQL, you won't get far in SQL Server without it. Added to that the need to learn the stored procedure language, which is based round SQL, and you've got a serious learning curve ahead of you.

Need to write a front end

You wouldn't develop a SQL Server database and give it to a client in its base format. Instead most developers create a "front-end", containing the menus and forms for your database. These could be written in Access, using Windows Forms, using ASP.NET or PHP as a website, using Delphi, or using any other menu/form application, but whichever you choose you've still got another application to write.

Cost of SQL Server

SQL Server isn't cheap (the last time the author looked, it cost over 4,000 UK pounds for a licence), although you can download SQL Server Express free of charge, and this works in exactly the same way for all but the largest databases.

Our conclusion? SQL Server is much pleasanter to use as a database engine than Access, simply because it rarely if ever falls over and it runs so quickly. That said, unless you're a SQL expert you'll want to create all of your forms, queries and reports in a front-end application like Access. However, for ease of deployment and upgrade, we'd choose an ASP.NET website with a SQL Server back-end any time (but then, we do already know Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual Studio, SQL Server stored procedures and HTML). For the novice, we'd suggest creating an Access database first, then upgrading it to SQL Server if or when it starts falling over.

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