Does anyone have a good URL or info whre Oracle and Access are
compared to one another in performance, security, cost etc. Before
you jump on me I know Oracle is a Cadillac compared to Access the Ford
Fairlane. I need this info to complete a school project. Thanks.

Rosco,
More like Oracle is an Abrams M1 tank delivered (in some versions) to your
door disassembled and Access is a dune buggy with a BB gun mounted on the
rollcage. Both are intended for the professional development community to
help businesses capture and understand the data relevant to an
organization's operations. Oracle is a big rdbms originally created to help
the CIA. Access was created in its early versions for the desktop with
machines running Windows 3.1. Oracle in version 8.6 was a very capable
beast that rewarded a professional developer with some rather useful
capabilities but didn't tolerate admin assistants or other Non-IT folks
well. (Thus the unassembled tank thing). Access is much easier to get
started with but doesn't scale well so bigger projects (file sizes exceeding
a gigabyte or so in Access 2000) can turn in to budget eating sources of
frustration. You can get a student copy of Personal Oracle for around
$10.00 or so that gives you a couple months to play around with it before
the clock runs out and it refuses to run. Microsoft may still offer trial
copies of Access (I haven't checked lately. They tend to do this around the
time a new release is coming out as part of the marketing campaign.) for
$5.00 or so.
As for which is better--well, depends. (Consultants are such a pain--they
never give a straight answer) If you need something big and the complexity
of Oracle (at least in version 8.6, things may be better now (I hope so))
doesn't bother you then it's worth the effort. But . . . Access backed by
the desktop edition of SQL Server (MSDE--now called Microsoft Data Engine, I
believe) is pretty cool and MSDE does scale rather nicely into bigger
versions of SQL Server.

"Rosco" <rosco (AT) cox (DOT) net> wrote