Thursday, November 07, 2013

The weirdly under-appreciated power of Microsoft Access - Saved queries behave like Oracle Views.

It was only when I was recently forced to explore SQL subqueries (there's a reason people invented functions and even Entity SQL) that I realized why Microsoft Access [1] is so much more powerful than, say, SQL Management Studio.

Yeah, you can access lots of diverse data sources, do (except, weirdly, for unions) ANSI SQL with an excellent GUI tool, store data locally, etc etc.

That's good, but the weird power is that Access treats queries as though they were views. It's trivial to do deeply nested subqueries, create libraries of modular queries, etc.

Except I must be missing something, because this is too obviously useful...

[1] Old, weird, creaky, infested, bizarre, baroque Microsoft Access, whose useful bits have changed very little in the past 16 years and which is a Frankenstein of every Microsoft technology since 1990.

No comments:

Post a Comment