Is ms-access a true recommendation for students to use with VB? 2

[TopTeller]

Should we use MS-access at back-end (with VB) knowing that it has some limitations and we won't be preferring it during our professional lives.

 

[Andrzejek]

There are a lot of professionals who use MS Access with great success. You can build very impressive applications with Access, or very, very bad and lousy, a nightmare apps with Oracle or SQL Server as a back end. The same goes for the front end - lousy, cumbersome, and hard to use apps in C#, VB.NET, Java, or a pleasure and very functional front end in VBA.

IMHO, students should be exposed to a proper, standard way of designing a back end, and a front end, with whatever is available to them.


---- Andy

There is a great need for a sarcasm font.

 

[SamBones]

Well, my advice for someone starting their professional career is, don't get married to one technology or tool. It's OK to become an Access guru, but, like Andrzejek says, focus on the proper way to design the back-end and front-end of an application. That's what will benefit you most during your career.

Then, when you get a chance or opportunity, also learn Oracle, SQL Server, ProgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, etcSQL, etcSQL. A lot of times that's just a matter of noting the similarities and differences. You may have to learn a couple SQL dialects. But the benefit is, you become much more marketable. You're worth more to the company you work for, and finding a new job is easier if you decide to move on for whatever reason.

I know someone that got a degree in IT in the early 80's. The only language she knew was COBOL. She didn't want to learn anything else. She was a COBOL guru and made good money. By the early 90's, she was out of a job and couldn't find work. As the year 2000 approached (Google "Y2K bug"), she was all of a sudden in high demand. She had 6 to 8 months of intense work with a lot of overtime. Y2K passed and a couple months later she was back on the streets looking for a job. She hasn't worked in IT a single day since. All because she got married to a technology and didn't want to learn anything else. The world moved on.

We are in an field where the technology changes rapidly and moves forward quickly. If you are approaching it with the idea that once you get your degree, you're good to go, then you are probably going to have a very limited career. If you enjoy learning new technology, and just kind of geek out when something radically new comes along, then you'll do good. You are living in an amazing time. All the world's knowledge is at your finger tips. You just need to spend the time and effort.

 

[TopTeller]

Thank you SamBones for your comprehensive reply. Yes, programmers from early 80s and even 90s suffered a lot due to "Y2K bug". I was lucky though to stay safe . I didn't like COBOL even that time and now the world has totally changed.
But still in my opinion we should let our students to have maximum exposure of SQL Server instead of ms-access.

 

[SamBones]

It sounds like you might have missed my point. My point is that learning MS-access is fine. It's a good thing to know. But at some point you should be learning other database engines so you aren't locked into an MS-access world.

And as Andy pointed out, it's most important for you to learn good design and development method, and best practices for designing and creating applications. Those skills will work with all database environments. Those are the skills that will benefit you most in a career.