I recently came across this post on Facebook (yeah, I know, I know... Facebook, ugh) in one of the Access groups I frequent. This company is offering an "Upsizing Wizard" to get Access databases in the cloud and working on Azure SQL. OK. I'm definitely interested. So I went to their website to learn more about the product, and I was INSTANTLY turned off by the amount of misinformation presented. Here's the review I'm posting on FB for them.

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In response to your post on Facebook, I was curious about your product and went to your website for more information. Unfortunately, I cannot endorse any companies that have false and/or misleading information about Microsoft Access on their site in an attempt to push prospective customers into their solution.

First of all, your website mentions "major weaknesses of Microsoft Access," such as it not being designed for use by multiple users, which is simply not true. I have set up many hundreds of multi-user database solutions with Microsoft Access. The primary issue is that they all have to be on the same network, an in-house LAN. On your site, you claim that data can be corrupted when two people manipulate the same data, and that Access is designed to be standalone by nature, which is, again, not true. This shows your unfamiliarity with a concept as simple as record locking. A properly designed database will not have this problem.

Next, you say that Access has no "system operational functions" such as security, backup, log management, etc., but these are all things that any capable Access Developer can build into the database; it just takes a little knowledge. In fact, I have lessons available on all of this, so saying that Access does not have these features is misleading. It just requires a bit of setup by someone who knows what they're doing. While true table-level security involves a database server, like SQL Server, a capable Access developer can still build a system with "good enough" security for most environments.

You then list "performance degradation and capacity limitations," which I will agree with. As you start adding more and more users, and more data, the database will slow down, but of course that will happen with ANY database system. You mention the two-gigabyte capacity limit of an Access database, but do not mention that you can chain multiple backend databases together for essentially unlimited storage. Once again, your website is misleading in an attempt to push people into your solution.

You then say that Access can't be easily changed to a client-server architecture and cannot be cloud-based. I'll agree with the statement that you do need SQL Server to be a true client-server platform, and such an upgrade isn't simple. However, you claim that there's a problem using linked tables. I've set up many databases, both on-premises and cloud-based, using SQL Server with linked tables, and as long as they are set up properly, there are absolutely no problems whatsoever with this method. I use it daily myself, so again, your site is misleading.

As for your pricing, I understand that to setup a single system, you are charging 300,000 yen, which at current conversion rates is about $2,000 US, and then you charge 20,000 yen monthly as a maintenance fee, which is about $128. Is this per user or per database? Your page simply says "1 system" so it's not clear. If this is a per-user price, that's quite steep.

While I was really looking forward to reviewing your product for my YouTube channel, I'm a bit skeptical of any company that puts misleading information on their website. Should you decide to update your site to give Access the credit it deserves for being a perfectly capable and robust LAN-based database, then I'll reconsider my review.

Thank you.

Richard Rost
AccessLearningZone.com

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Thoughts?