I was reading this article over at Codewalkers and realized I was in trouble the instant I came across this sentence:

With numerous choices available on the market, considering you don’t want to put too much investment on it, only MySQL stands out from the crowd.

I have no idea why people continue to ignore PostgresSQL. I think they read too much of the Linux propaganda which always seems to emphasize MySQL, but PostgresSQL is just as capable, if not more capable, of performing the same tasks as MySQL, but I digress.

The article covers whether or not you should move your data over to MySQL from Access. This to me doesn’t even sound like an option. You should just do it if you are having more than 1 connection hitting the Access “database”. At my first job, 50% of the tech support issues revolved around people being locked out of shared Access databases. It’s a great tool for desktop database use, but should not be used for real database use like some companies try and make it become.

They go on to make some points on why you wouldn’t wish to migrate your Access data to MySQL and two of them seem to miss the point completely:

  • You want your data be easily portable. Since Access is a local based program, you can take your data with your wherever you like by just copying the file into a disk. The file can be opened with an Access program installed in another computer.
  • You prioritize the use of the reporting features of Access more than the database features of MySQL.

Looking at the first point it’s silly to say that Access data is more “portable” than MySQL data since you can just go into PHPMyAdmin and do a text file export of your data and put it on disk just as easily. If you wanted to open the file on another Access application then you are probably better off using a shared MySQL database anyways.

For the second point they seem to overlook the fact that you can use Access as a frontend to MySQL and still use the reporting functionality.

Once you get to the next couple of pages you learn that the real intent of this article is just to sell their product Navicat. It’s a shame because a good article could be had if they really wanted to do an indepth comparison.