Happy Birthday, Microsoft Access!

Today’s the birthday of Excel’s much-unloved brother.

He’s often been the butt of jokes — some would even call him the ‘Mickey Mouse’ of the database world.

That’s right. Microsoft Access is 30 years old.

You knew that already though, didn’t you? 😉

Version 1.0 of the much-maligned relational database management system (RDBMS) was released on this day in 1992.

For many of us, the program was our introduction to databases. I was 14 when we started using it at school. We learned about tables, fields, records, and datatypes.

A few years later, at college, it was relational structures, foreign keys, and composite keys.

While certainly not as fashionable as MySQL, SQL Server, and Oracle — and with obvious disadvantages in today’s cloud-based world — nothing beats it as a starting point.

In fact, it may even be making a mini-revival.

Back in 2018, Microsoft announced they would be removing Access from Office 365. Later they changed their minds, and updates continued to be deployed.

One of the most significant ones was the Access connector for the Power Platform.

This circumvents the limitation Access has always had as a mobile-unfriendly platform. Now you really can update a database on the move!

What are your memories of Access?