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Article on MS Access Vs MySQL

Posted: Wed Jun 30, 2004 1:44 am
by Paddy
I have been googling for about an hour on this and the returns are starting to poop me so I thought I would see if any of the gurus on here know of a link to a GREAT article on comparing the above two databases.

It needs to be rather well structured if possible.

Cheers for any help.

Posted: Wed Jun 30, 2004 5:32 am
by patrikG
The company I'm working has been using MS Access in the past to develop a couple of quick database designs (yes, really...:(). That's what MS Access is good for - it has a very powerful GUI for SQL to set up tables and show dependencies - the best I've seen so far (compared to, for example TORA, PLEdit, iSQL for Oracle and phpmyadmin for MySQL). When I heard that they are interfacing Access via ODBC with Oracle for a live website my mouth was agape. We're now migrating everything to Oracle.
In terms of performance and scalability, Access cannot compare to MySQL or any "pure" database. While, yes, you can have Access as an online database, it is very cumbersome and slow. I am not sure, but I don't think Access has more advanced features like atomic transaction (very necessary for eCommerce) as MySQL and postgreSQL.

At home I have my addresses stored in an Access database. That works fine, easy to set up, easy to print etc. For anything webrelated there is no question to use MySQL, Oracle or, something I still have to immerse myself in, postgreSQL. Bottomline: if it's meant to be for a website, use MySQL or postgreSQL (which, unlike MySQL, has stored procedures).