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Microsoft Office Access, previously known as Microsoft Access, is a relational database management system from Microsoft that combines the relational Microsoft Jet Database Engine with a graphical user interface and software development tools. It is a member of the 2007 Microsoft Office system.

Access can use data stored in Access/Jet, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, or any ODBC-compliant data container (including MySQL and PostgreSQL). Skilled software developers and data architects use it to develop application software. Relatively unskilled programmers and non-programmer "power users" can use it to build simple applications. It supports some object-oriented techniques but falls short of being a fully object-oriented development tool. Access was also the name of a communications program from Microsoft, meant to compete with ProComm and other programs. This proved a failure and was dropped.Years later Microsoft reused the name for its database software.

Features

One of the benefits of Access from a programmer's perspective is its relative compatibility with SQL- queries can be viewed graphically or edited as SQL statements, and SQL statements can be used directly in Macros and VBA Modules to manipulate Access tables. Users can mix and use both VBA and "Macros" for programming forms and logic and offers object-oriented possibilities.

Unlike other RDBMS, Microsoft Access does not implement database triggers or stored procedures. Starting in Access 2000 (Jet 4.0), there is a new syntax for creating queries with parameters, in a way that looks like creating stored procedures, but these procedures are still limited to one statement per procedure.

In ADP files (supported in Access 2000 and later), the database-related features are geared more towards a client-server architecture with MSDE or Microsoft SQL Server serving as the back-end instead of using the Jet Engine. Thus, it supports the creation of nearly all objects in the underlying server (tables with constraints and triggers, views, stored procedures and UDF-s). However, only forms, reports, macros and modules are stored in the ADP file (the other objects are stored in the back-end database). This centralization of queries and tables in the database server provides a more reliable development environment for most businesses.

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