Personal Databases

Some of the competition that had entered the User’s Choice

Club last year has apparently not been able to make it this year. The top-three

positions are occupied by the same products as last year, though in a different

order. MS Access remains the winner for the second consecutive year. However,

the second and third positions have been exchanged between Personal Oracle and

FoxPro.

It appears that Oracle has gained considerable ground this

year, as it was far behind FoxPro last year. Those that have dropped out are SQL

Server and dBase. SQL was chosen by a few, but the numbers were not significant

enough to reach the Club. dBase seems to have vanished completely from the

scene.

Last year Access made it to the top by a hair’s length over

FoxPro. however, this year it has a comfortable lead. Ease-of-use seems to be

the main reason for this. Having GUI and wizards to create all database

structures does have its own advantages, which are being fully utilized by

Access.

Maybe Access will not hold this advantage for long, as Oracle

has seen quite a lot of growth in this arena in the past two years. Last year,

it shot up from 11 to a UPI of 40. This year, it has shot up even further to 84.

However, it’s very difficult to predict what will happen

one year from now, as databases are undergoing significant improvements and

changes. For example, Microsoft recently demonstrated a product called the

Access Workflow Designer, which can actually help create workflow and keep track

of it within an organization.

The other major innovation has been Web connectivity. You can view an entire

database through a Web browser, so you don’t need to have it installed on

every machine. If these innovations continue, then you’re likely to see fierce

competition among personal databases in the future. We’ll "query"

the results next year.