Data management products (was: How do you lock your web app data?)

[Alex Martelli]

"Cameron Laird" <claird at starbase.neosoft.com> wrote in message
news:D62094CDC48C0FCA.44A0CB1CEB4E1F76.B8EA27DB5535EBAD at lp.airnews.net...
    [snip]
> Actually, all these Alex has mentioned have
> capabilities that'll knock the socks off vic-
> tims habituated to Access, for example.

Just one attempt at terminology clarification...:

Access is a possibly-handy GUI IDE front-end for cobbling together
possibly-intricated DB operations; at least if you don't mind
programming in VBA (sigh), for some things it's usable (and
may be better than professional VB if you have but little custom
code and use its intrinsic abilities a lot -- much like, say, Excel).

What was in a far, distant past misnamed 'the Access database'
by Microsoft marketroids (the same misbegotten ilk who managed
for years to throw confusion around COM by misnaming everything
COM *as if* it had anything to do with various technologies who were
and are *ON TOP* of COM itself -- at first, OLE, later, Active/X), is
now fortunately again known only by its true name, 'Jet'.  It's a
very old-technology, legacy engine, with no pluses I can think of
when compared to MSDE, Postgres, etc.

Fortunately, Access of course works perfectly well with MSDE (or
other editions of SQL Server), Oracle, and no doubt other good
RDBMS's yet.  Even if one IS habituated to Access (and there may
be perfectly good reasons for choosing it to develop certain DB
apps, I guess), there is no reason not to switch to a better engine
underneath the chrome (given that MSDE is freely redistributable
under the conditions I mentioned in my previous message, for
example).  [To be honest, personally, I'm having a hard time
thinking up anything I'd *want* to code in Access, other VBA
platforms, Foxpro, or similar languages, rather than Python --
but, I'm sure there are niches where such tools help a lot].


Alex