Access vs VB6 - John Smiley



|Access vs VB6 |

|Use Access |Use Visual Basic |

|For an application that requires frequent enhancements which must be |The project requires coordinated team effort including version control |

|turned around quickly, nothing’s faster than Access. |and component deployment implementation. |

|When the application won’t require WAN access, even in front-end/back-end |The app is a distributed client-server or n-tier system that may neeed |

|scenario, the overhead of Jet on the client makes a WAN implementation |to scale over the enterprise and incorporate latest data access |

|unreasonable. |technologies. |

|The application has many tables with complex relationships. The ability to|The back-end may not necessarily be Jet or SQL Server. The application |

|declare cascading deletes is still an advantage of Jet over SQL Server 7.0|may already use an existing enterprise DBMS. |

|The intrinsic Access controls, plus supported ActiveX controls ( i.e., |The application makes more extensive use of ActiveX controls or creates|

|TreeView, ListView, Common dialog), provide an acceptable user interface. |User Controls and distributes them. VB has direct access to .DLL and |

| |.OCX libraries. |

|The project is relatively small—the number of VBA objects is limited to |The project may grow very large. VB6 has no limit to the number of |

|1,000. Access 97 decompiles and GPF’s frequently with larger databases. |project components. VB projects can’t decompile by nature. |

|Memory and disk footprint on the client isn’t important. Access 97 mdb’s |Footprint and performance are important. Many VB projects require as |

|can get quite large. The minimum distributable application is almost 17MB.|little as 2-3 megabytes. Similar projects in Access and VB run faster |

| |in VB. |

|It’s sufficient to distribute the application as an .MDB or .MDE file. It |The application must be implementable as a reusable COM component. |

|won;t be reused as component of another system. | |

|Your targeted users don’t have a bias against Access. Whether true or not,|Perception is important. VB is considered more industrial-strength than|

|perception is reality for a commercial product. |Access. It’s actively promoted as a premier development tool of Visual |

| |Studio. |

“The Access to Visual Basic Transition”, Project Development column, pg.60,

Access-Office-VB Advisor, Sept ‘99

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SUMMARY:

Access tries to strike a balance between being a user tool and a professional programmer’s environment, Visual Basic is explicitly oriented toward the latter.

When is Visual Basic better than Access?

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