I work for a large organization which has thousands of MS Access applications floating around. I didn't write any of these - in fact, most of the original authors have long since left the company - but from time to time another Access app lands on my desk for support. I would soooo love to replace access with a different solution.
I know that there are several good alternatives for the database part of MS Access (the Jet database), such as SQLite, MySQL, VistaDB, etc.
What I would like to know is: Is there anything that will replace the front end part of MS Access?
I.e. Something which can be used to build forms, write simple scripts and queries, etc?
@BracC asked "why replace access?" - A fair question indeed.
I want to get rid of access because:
what I would really love to find is something which can read in an MDB file and output something like C# which replicates the functionality. (Or any language - not fussy).
I hope this is all clear. If not, please post a comment and I'll re-write/add detail.
@GuinnessFan makes some points I find interesting. I have added my comments to discuss those points.
What we have done since I asked the question:
May I say many thanks, to everybody who has given me helpful answers.
Open SSMA for Access. Select File, and then select New Project. Enter a project name and a location to save your project. Then select a SQL Server migration target from the drop-down list, and select OK.
I switched the back-end on one application from MSacces to MSSQL a few years ago. Kept the front-end, because it worked well, and I didn't find anything as easy to use/modify.
I've never seen a MSAccess -> C# translator. However, you might be able to find a MSAccess to VB6 translator (their syntaxes are roughly similar), and from there there are VB6->VB.Net translators (and even VB.Net ->C# translators)
You could check out Oracle's Application Express. It's free and it's geared toward Access developers.
It has a migration assistant as well that you run your Access database through, it proccesses the data and the forms, migrates everything to an Oracle Database (this works with the free database, Oracle XE, and comes install by default) and builds web forms for your Access database.
So in the end you'll have your Access databases on the web, your data in Oracle and somewhat nice web front end for extending them.
As far as Oracle goes, the tool isn't half bad. You can sign up for a free instance to play around with here.
Here's the document that explains how you migrate Access Databases.
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