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Re:Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die by miki123211 on Thursday October 31, 2019 @05:44AM (#21407047)
In polish high schools, Access is still a part of the computer science curriculum (for those who take CS). It doesn't have to be Access specifically, but it is in 99% of cases. You can't really avoid it, as it's required on the Matura exam. I've heard rumors that some teachers even teach the point and click interface instead of SQL.
Re:Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die by froindt on Thursday October 31, 2019 @10:39AM (#21409284)
To be fair, if you're gonna be in access, their SQL query writing interface is a steaming pile of issues. In my experience:

1) You can't do multi-line queries. After executing, it'll smash it all to one line again.

2) You can't add comments. After executing, it'll delete them out.

3) It doesn't do any syntax highlighting.

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Years ago I worked for a company who had tons of manufacturing production data. Someone built an interface to query the data - used by just a couple people. Mind you, this isn't Access, it was homebrew software. Eventually word spread about the data you could access, and dozens to hundreds of people got access.

They never got to the top of the priority list to make it multi-user, separate profiles, create permissions on queries, etc.

There was a mandatory 8 hour training session with a test before getting access to the environment. Dev queries were automatically deleted 90 days since last run. On prod, 365 days. This was to reduce clutter. Query names were terse. You had to know people who knew what queries did. Comments were used sparingly. Anyone could edit and view any query available.

I copied a query, made edits, then executed. Got weird results. It took 1.5 days to figure out the parser was messed up! First, line comments using ' were excluded. Next block comments using /* */ were excluded. However, if a macro was called inside a block comment, it was executed.

That was the most frustrating bug I've ever debugged. Literally I'd copy the query, it'd run successfull, I'd comment out a couple returned values, and it'd fall on it's face because of how macros worked.

Re:Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die by m1k1 on Thursday October 31, 2019 @05:47AM (#21407061)
I even had point and click access on "information technology" course on the life sciences faculy on of the biggest polish university ~7 years ago