Microsoft Data Access Tool

It's been suggested very strongly several times that I find a Jet Database engine repair tool kit. That, and MdAC Data Access components. I'm not really sure what those things are but I think it has to do with memory or registry, or both. Microsoft Access is a database management system (DBMS) from Microsoft that combines the relational Microsoft Jet Database Engine with a graphical user interface and software-development tools. It is a member of the Microsoft Office suite of applications, included in the Professional and higher editions or sold separately. It is also a member of the Microsoft.

You may know Microsoft Access as the most famous software to build database apps. It represents an absolutely versatile tool to create any number of applications that work with relational databases, forms, and workflows.

While a great option with a rich set of features, developers sometimes struggle to know actual use cases of apps they could build by using Microsoft Access. Most of the development happens to be on-demand: as other departments float requirements, the IT department uses Access to quickly build custom apps. Manual woodworkers and weavers plates. Those without IT smarts should simply be looking at a do-it-yourself database app builder.

Today, we will see different examples of database apps you can build with Access.

Inventory management system

Software Matter crafted a great step-by-step guide to help you go through the entire development of a simple inventory management system.

CRM

CRM is perhaps the most common business software for sales teams out there. There are many vendors offering generic and tailored solutions for companies across the board. Out-of-the-box CRMs cover generic requirements: capturing contact information, managing the stage of the purchase decision, keeping track of sales success with reporting etc. On the other hand, some companies find their CRM needs so specific they simply decide to build their own system.

You can see this tutorial about how to set up your own CRM with Access made by Arkware.

Project management

Project management happens to be one of the key “collaboration” needs in any organization. These systems are basically composed of a set of tasks and subtasks that contain fields such as dates, descriptions, current state, assignees etc.

If you want to see an advanced project management software, you may want to take a look at HyperOffice’s project management module.

For this example, see Proven Success’ detailed PDF tutorial about how to create a project management module with Microsoft Access.

Patients records

On a daily basis, doctors need to store and manage their patients’ data, such as history, profile, and medical observations. A lot of this information was managed manually, but with more digital technology entering the healthcare space, and greater regulatory requirements, organizations are opting for automated systems.

To build your own patient recording app with Access, simply check Source Code Tester’s tutorial to set up yours.

SMS system

While useful, Microsoft Office suite products like Access and Excel tend to be very plain; this is why Twilio went very creative to use its API to communicate with Microsoft Access to create a great new feature: real-time alerts through SMS messages. Just imagine notifying in real-time everyone about an important input or interaction with their app. SMS alerts are a great way to add instantaneity (is that a word?) to their database apps.

Invoice generator

You can create a database app to assign each customer a specific value, products, calculated taxes, and additional expenses to instantly create their invoices—and this is exactly what this Microsoft Access expert does in this tutorial.

Providers management

One of the critical processes in businesses is managing suppliers and providers; they don’t just represent an expense that should be reduced as much as possible, they are also the input that lets companies create their end product. Working with several providers may become complex; you need to manually manage each of them. You can see an example of an Access database application for this purpose here, built by Access to Go.

HR processes

Microsoft Access User's Manual

Simple processes are often ignored, and can be a creeping resource sap. This is often the fate of employee management. If you don’t want to go down this path, you can start building your own HR application by visiting this tutorial and example.

A Microsoft Access Online alternative?

The immense potential has prompted most organizations to move their tech infrastructure online; Microsoft Access responded with a cloud version within its Sharepoint suite. But, unfortunately for many developers who expressed their discontent, Microsoft announced they’re retiring Access online and offered Microsoft Power Apps as an alternative — which has so far fallen below expectations.

That’s exactly why Hyperbase often shows up as a Microsoft Access Online alternative – create beautiful forms with a simple drag and drop interface, connect databases, and even automate workflows without high end IT skills. If you want to give Hyperbase a try, we can help you migrate from your current [legacy] Microsoft Access system, for free. Get started here!

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In Visual Studio, you can create applications that connect to data in virtually any database product or service, in any format, anywhere—on a local machine, on a local area network, or in a public, private, or hybrid cloud.

For applications in JavaScript, Python, PHP, Ruby, or C++, you connect to data like you do anything else, by obtaining libraries and writing code. For .NET applications, Visual Studio provides tools that you can use to explore data sources, create object models to store and manipulate data in memory, and bind data to the user interface. Microsoft Azure provides SDKs for .NET, Java, Node.js, PHP, Python, Ruby, and mobile apps, and tools in Visual Studio for connecting to Azure Storage.

The following lists show just a few of the many database and storage systems that can be used from Visual Studio. The Microsoft Azure offerings are data services that include all provisioning and administration of the underlying data store. The Azure development workload in Visual Studio 2017 enables you to work with Azure data stores directly from Visual Studio.

The following lists show just a few of the many database and storage systems that can be used from Visual Studio. The Microsoft Azure offerings are data services that include all provisioning and administration of the underlying data store. The Azure development workload in Visual Studio 2019 enables you to work with Azure data stores directly from Visual Studio.

Most of the other SQL and NoSQL database products that are listed here can be hosted on a local machine, on a local network, or in Microsoft Azure on a virtual machine. If you host the database in a Microsoft Azure virtual machine, you're responsible for managing the database itself.

Microsoft Azure

SQL Database
Azure Cosmos DB
Storage (blobs, tables, queues, files)
SQL Data Warehouse
SQL Server Stretch Database
StorSimple
And more..

SQL

SQL Server 2005-2016 (includes Express and LocalDB)
Firebird
MariaDB
MySQL
Oracle
PostgreSQL
SQLite
And more..

NoSQL

Apache Cassandra
CouchDB
MongoDB
NDatabase
OrientDB|
RavenDB
VelocityDB
And more..

Many database vendors and third parties support Visual Studio integration by NuGet packages. You can explore the offerings on nuget.org or through the NuGet Package Manager in Visual Studio (Tools > NuGet Package Manager > Manage NuGet Packages for Solution). Other database products integrate with Visual Studio as an extension. You can browse these offerings in the Visual Studio Marketplace or by navigating to Tools > Extensions and Updates and then selecting Online in the left pane of the dialog box. For more information, see Compatible database systems for Visual Studio.

Many database vendors and third parties support Visual Studio integration by NuGet packages. You can explore the offerings on nuget.org or through the NuGet Package Manager in Visual Studio (Tools > NuGet Package Manager > Manage NuGet Packages for Solution). Other database products integrate with Visual Studio as an extension. You can browse these offerings in the Visual Studio Marketplace or by navigating to Extensions > Manage Extensions and then selecting Online in the left pane of the dialog box. For more information, see Compatible database systems for Visual Studio.

Note

Extended support for SQL Server 2005 ended on April 12, 2016. There is no guarantee that data tools in Visual Studio 2015 and later will continue to work with SQL Server 2005. For more information, see the end-of-support announcement for SQL Server 2005.

.NET languages

All .NET data access, including in .NET Core, is based on ADO.NET, a set of classes that defines an interface for accessing any kind of data source, both relational and non-relational. Visual Studio has several tools and designers that work with ADO.NET to help you connect to databases, manipulate the data, and present the data to the user. The documentation in this section describes how to use those tools. You can also program directly against the ADO.NET command objects. For more information about calling the ADO.NET APIs directly, see ADO.NET.

For applications in which you are not processing huge amounts of data or performing complex queries or transformations. A DataSet object consists of DataTable and DataRow objects that logically resemble SQL database objects much more than .NET objects. For relatively simple applications based on SQL data sources, datasets might still be a good choice.

There is no requirement to use any of these technologies. In some scenarios, especially where performance is critical, you can simply use a DataReader object to read from the database and copy the values that you need into a collection object such as List<T>.

Native C++

C++ applications that connect to SQL Server should use the Microsoft® ODBC Driver 13.1 for SQL Server in most cases. If the servers are linked, then OLE DB is necessary and for that you use the SQL Server Native Client. You can access other databases by using ODBC or OLE DB drivers directly. ODBC is the current standard database interface, but most database systems provide custom functionality that can't be accessed through the ODBC interface. OLE DB is a legacy COM data-access technology that is still supported but not recommended for new applications. For more information, see Data Access in Visual C++.

C++ programs that consume REST services can use the C++ REST SDK.

C++ programs that work with Microsoft Azure Storage can use the Microsoft Azure Storage Client.

Data modeling—Visual Studio does not provide an ORM layer for C++. ODB is a popular open-source ORM for C++.

To learn more about connecting to databases from C++ apps, see Visual Studio data tools for C++. For more information about legacy Visual C++ data-access technologies, see Data Access.

JavaScript

JavaScript in Visual Studio is a first-class language for building cross-platform apps, UWP apps, cloud services, websites, and web apps. You can use Bower, Grunt, Gulp, npm, and NuGet from within Visual Studio to install your favorite JavaScript libraries and database products. Connect to Azure storage and services by downloading SDKs from the Azure website. Edge.js is a library that connects server-side JavaScript (Node.js) to ADO.NET data sources.

Python

Install Python support in Visual Studio to create Python applications. The Azure documentation has several tutorials on connecting to data, including the following:

Work with blobs, files, queues, and tables (Cosmo DB).

Microsoft Excel Diagnostics

Data in Office Solutions—Contains links to topics that explain how data works in Office solutions. This includes information about schema-oriented programming, data caching, and server-side data access.