Must have tool for Migrating Access to SQL Server

I have a love hate relationship with Access for the same reason, it’s seductive simplicity.  You can knock up an application in no time, which my wife did recently to learn the tool and to keep track of our extensive book collection. 

That quick start and get going appeal, starts to pail as the application gets bigger especially when it need to be used buy more than a dozen people. Access apps are often written by business users and so the app will probably be very useful and become very popular.  At this point its existence an application like this in a large organisation may well come to the attention of the IT support team because it breaks or performs poorly.  You could argue that whoever gave Access to the users should be taken out and shot, but if the business have gone to the trouble of writing this then it is clearly useful and may well needs to be supported.

Migrating the application from Access to SQL Server would solve many of the performance and concurrency issues, but that could involve quite a lot of work.  I mentioned that there are two migration assistants for Access in may last post, but I forgot to mention that in common with many other Microsoft tools there is often a partner developed alternative that offers better features albeit at a price. In this case the Must have tool is called MUST which I saw at the last SQL Bits. As this grid shows it provides a range of tools to help with the process

and you can just migrate the database or go all the way to delivering a VB or web client.  Definitely worth looking at if you have a few users in your business who are closet Access developers.

Technorati Tags: MUST,NMigration,Access,SQL Server