Reply #15: MS Access

[dbDESIGN]

MS Access is Microsoft's desktop database system. It's considered part of the MS Office suite though you can buy it on its own.

It is very good for small business database applications, order entry, inventory, quotations systems and such. It is not considered robust or powerful enough for large scale enterprise solutions. It is also used as a rapid development tool to prototype applications which are later ported to enterprise level systems such as SQL Server 2000 for the database and a VB, C+ or other type of front-end. It can be powerfully programmed using VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) to produce very sophisticated applications and can be made reasonably secure if one wishes too.

One critical thing it does not do is keep a transaction log of any and all activity in the database. Systems like Oracle and SQL Server do this for security reasons and also to able to go back to clean data at given point in time in case of crashes, network outages, etc. The banking systems lives and dies on logging transactions.

I can guarantee you that no ATM/banking system produced by the ESS, etc. uses Access in any end user, network or production system.

Its use in voting systems suggest 2 things to me:

1. The vendor is supplying the quickest-to-market, cheapest product he can.

2. Security, accountability and audit-ability are not critical requirements for the software.