why should i use access over oracle, for a facilities management .

[steve avis]

i am carrying out a research project for my class 1 and have to produce a
facilities management system capable of tracking resources, assets and
utilities. i was told that access would be a sufficient platform to achieve
my aim?

any assistance in this matter (opinions or facts) would be greatly appreciated

thanks steve

 

[Rick B]

Based on what little information you have given, Access would be able to
handle the task.

The biggest advantage I could see to Access is that it is very available and
integrates well with other Office products.

I must admit that I know very little about Oracle.

Rick B

 

[David Seeto via AccessMonster.com]

I'd see it as a matter of scale. Access is a great environment to put something together and make some changes later on and to get some good looking screens working with a minimum of fuss. If you're familiar with Visual Basic, you can do more sophisticated things. But if you want the application to support hundreds of users and need to be able to manage the database at a very detailed level for backups, performance tuning, locking, etc etc, then an industrial strength database like Oracle would let you do that. Microsoft themselves have a different database for that sort of requirement, SQL Server.

It sounds like this is a teaching exercise rather than a serious multi-user application, so I'd think MS Access would be fine. Oracle may be promoting an "Oracle Lite" version of their database, but they'd have to do a lot of work to challenge Access for ease of use.

Hope that helps.

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[John Vinson]

On Tue, 9 Nov 2004 12:55:34 -0800, "steve avis" <steve

i am carrying out a research project for my class 1 and have to produce a
facilities management system capable of tracking resources, assets and
utilities. i was told that access would be a sufficient platform to achieve
my aim?

any assistance in this matter (opinions or facts) would be greatly appreciated

I've worked with both (it's been a few years since I've done much with
Oracle, I'll confess).

Oracle is a very powerful, heavy-duty client-server relational
database. It's good for multimillion row, live-backup,
business-critical applications, with journaling, a powerful
programming language (PL/SQL), and lots of spiffy features.

Access is a highly competent, file-server, desktop database. It's
sharable on a good LAN, for up to thirty or forty users; it's limited
to 2 GByte in any single database. It's got a fully competent
programming language (VBA) and a choice of good database engines: the
default JET and MSDE, which is essentially SQL/Server with some
limitations. It's good for tables up to in the low millions of rows,
with care; I'd be leery of going beyond 5 million or so though.

For a corporate, wide-area, mission critical, or very large database,
you should use Oracle. Plan to have at least one full time equivalent
devoted to database administration, and some months to develop the
application.

For a departmental, local-area, conscientiously-backed up database,
Access will be much faster to develop and much cheaper to maintain.


John W. Vinson[MVP]
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