A Farewell to Access

Today, I used Microsoft Access for what I sincerely hope will be my last time.

I had been using it on a quarterly basis, as part of perfoming a reporting process for a company in my area. The process - which was created far before I got involved - went something like this:

• Get the backup tape from the SCO OpenSewer/Advanced PICK machine
• Restore the tape on the Linux/PICK D3 machine
• Do a bunch of mucking about on that machine to create ODBC-accessible SQL views
• Use Excel to pull data off via ODBC
• Muck around with the data in Excel
• Feed parts of the data through Access, with a bunch of macros
• Muck around with the data in Excel some more
• Print out lots of results.

Anyway, the company recently got sold, so the SCO box, and everything associated with it, no longer matters.

On the down side, I'll have a little less work and pay as a result of this. On the up side, the work I'm losing involved technologies I'm really not a fan of, like SCO and PICK and Access.

Of course, I've been running Access (2000) on Windows XP SP 2, under Virtual PC 6, on a Mac. With this process gone, I really won't have any reason to boot into Windows - other than to run Windows Update, which I already do far more often than I actually do anything productive with Windows. That says something!