On this particular project we are handling so much data that it’s infeasible to use excel. I being the compsci guy have been officially appointed as the “data monkey” of the team. and i’m trying to use M$ Access to crunch our data.
now, this is the first time ever that i’m working on a database thingy. frauded through my dbms course in IIT, and since haven’t touched a database with a bargepole. and here i am writing SQL queries day in and day out trying to manage our huge data. and i’m using probably the crappiest of all database management systems.
a few cribs i have about access. firstly, it doesn’t have the count distinct function! a fairly simple but extremely useful query, not having access to that has led me to using nested queries or creation of temporary tables.
secondly, access doesnt allow the concept of views! so i have this set of input tables and this other set of tables in which i store all the primary data and use for my queries. now, since there is no concept of views, i’ve to update all my tables each time a new piece of data comes in!
thirdly, which is the most pissing off thing, access is terrible at nested queries. it has absolutely no idea of this thing called dynamic programming and a query with a single nesting takes over half an hour to process (on a table of 150,000 lines).
i personally think M$ Access sucks, but have no idea of other databases. can someone provide me input on if the above problems exist with other databases also? also, is there some other windows based database which allows import and export of data to/from excel which sucks less than access so that i can use that?