Microsoft Access

Microsoft Office Access, previously known as Microsoft Access, is a relational database management system from Microsoft that combines the relational Microsoft Jet Database Engine with a graphical user interface and software-development tools. It is a member of the Microsoft Office suite of applications, included in the Professional and higher editions or sold separately. In mid-May 2010, the current version of Microsoft Access 2010 was released by Microsoft in Office 2010; Microsoft Office Access 2007 was the prior version. Access stores data in its own format based on the Access Jet Database Engine. It can also import or link directly to data stored in other applications and databases. Software developers and data architects can use Microsoft Access to develop application software, and "power users" can use it to build simple applications. Like other Office applications, Access is supported by Visual Basic for Applications, an object-oriented programming language that can reference a variety of objects including DAO (Data Access Objects), ActiveX Data Objects, and many other ActiveX components. Visual objects used in forms and reports expose their methods and properties in the VBA programming environment, and VBA code modules may declare and call Windows operating-system functions.

Microsoft's first attempt to sell a relational database product was during the mid 1980s, when Microsoft obtained license to sell R:Base. In the late 1980s Microsoft developed its own solution codenamed Omega^]. It was confirmed in 1988 that a database product for Windows and OS/2 was in development. The project was going to supplement Microsoft's lineup of Windows applications. It was going to include "EB" Embedded Basic language, which was going to be the language for writing macros in all Microsoft's application, but the unification of macro languages did not happen until the introduction of VBA. Omega was also expected to provide a front end to the Microsoft SQL Server. The application was very resource demanding and there were reports that it was working slow on then-available 386 processors. It was scheduled to be released in the 1st quarter of 1990, but in 1989 the development of the product was reset and it was rescheduled to be delivered no sooner than in January 1991. Parts of the project were later used for other Microsoft projects: Cirrus (codename for Access) and Thunder (codename for Visual Basic, where the Embedded Basic engine was used). After Access's premiere, the Omega project was demonstrated in 1992 to several journalists and included features, that were not available in Access.