I currently work on several applications at my company, one of which is a not so simple Access DB. It pulls in data from Excel, Oracle and, indirectly, SAP. It then crunches some numbers, displays reports and exports back to Excel. They really love Excel, PivotTables in particular, at my company (and by "my company", I mean "the company I work for"; I don't own it). I know Access can do PivotTables, but I'm nervous about letting users create objects in the DB. One big thing they want it to do in the future is to send data back to SAP. I told you it wasn't a simple Access DB.

I would love nothing more than to migrate this off of Access. My preference would be Oracle and PL/SQL for the DB and stored procedures, respectively, .NET for the GUI front-end and Business Objects for reporting and regurgitating to Excel. I would also consider ASP.NET as an alternative, or complementary, to the GUI.

I see this happening sooner rather than later for one reason, security. On an Access DB, it's virtually nonexistent. You can create workgroups, but they are a separate beast, entirely, and it's not integrated with Active Directory. The best you can do is to use file security on the MDB file itself. This means that if a user can get to the file, they can change anything, or even delete the whole MDB. Our compliance department would have kittens over this. We had two different initiatives to replace it over the years; both fell through. Maybe we'll finally get a real mandate from compliance, and finally have this not so simple Access DB shot, stuffed and mounted on the wall.