Hands on: Blasts from the past

I’ve been writing the database column for very nearly half PCW’s lifetime - since September 1993.

Looking back at that first column I find names both current and those that are distant memories.

I reported that Approach had been bought by Lotus: it’s now in the hands of IBM but still called Lotus Approach. It’s part of Smartsuite and has reached the dizzy heights of version 9.8.

I also reported on a Borland database conference and offered a tip for Paradox for Dos users. However, there was also a tip for Microsoft Access users - no change there, then - and the keystrokes needed to show the Access gang screen in Access 1.0.

It was an animation that showed two ducks floating peacefully upon a pond. A cloud trundled out over the water and blam! It hurled a bolt of lightning at the unsuspecting water fowl. As I said at the time: “The initial graphic makes sense as long as you know that the code name of Access was Cirrus and remember that a brace of water fowl can also be referred to as a pair o’ ducks”. You also, of course, have to pronounce pair o’ ducks with an American accent to come up with the name of the then major competitor, Paradox. I always did like a good pun.

So Access was barely a year old in September 1993 and already had a presence in the column. My second column included a review of Access 1.1 - an upgrade from 1.0 cost £14.95. From its launch I felt that Access was a huge improvement on the PC database products that had gone before - Dbase, Paradox, Foxpro, Filemaker etc - because it was relational in a meaningful way, unlike the others. However it very nearly wasn’t, as some little-known history (which I didn’t publish at the time) shows.

When the development team was put together and given the remit of creating a database management system for Microsoft, it developed a product codenamed Omega. During the development, of course, the team learnt a great deal about databases and relational database theory. So much so that by the end of the process, they felt they were finally in an excellent position to create a great product, but that Omega wasn’t it. They also knew that if Omega was released, future developments would forever be burdened and constrained by Omega’s less than optimal design.

The team presented this argument to Bill Gates and, to his great credit, he gave the OK to start again, a decision which must have written off a small fortune in development costs. The team started again on a product codenamed Cirrus - and the rest is history (as were the ducks).

Generically speaking
Most of the problems now sent to the column are about Access but, whenever possible, I try to give generic solutions to database problems so that readers using other relational databases (SQL Server, Oracle etc) can benefit. There are, of course, subtle differences in implementation, but the approach to the solution is often transferable. The database question in this month’s Question Time is a good example: Access syntax requires dates in queries to be wrapped up inside hash (#) symbols but the crux of the solution is the ‘Between… And’ operator. This is part of the SQL querying language and will work in any RDBMS that supports SQL (and effectively all RDBMSs do).

The generic nature of databases also means that most problems and topics covered in the column over the years are as applicable today as they were at the time.