I have been re-developing our collections management software into
v2.0 of MicroSoft Access and I am very impressed with it as a
development tool.  I had written the software we are converting
originally in dBaseIII+, then ported it to Oracle, then to Access
v1.0.  I must admit Access is a lot of power, and not every
application needs all it can offer, but it has most of the
functionality you might expect in higher priced and more complex
packages.

One of the things I like the most about it is the ability to use
Windows OLE conventions to move seamlessly between my database,
spreadsheet and word processor (yes, I am using MS-Office).

With appologies to Suzanne, it will deal effectively with images.  I
can give you an existance proof.  It took me two days to write, from
scratch, a relational imagebase using Access. (We are now
incorporating it as part of our main database).

We are in the process of mounting our database onto a db server
running under NT with Win95 and Win3.11 clients accessing it over an
ethernet.  Stay tuned.

Theoretically be using a field defined as an OLE Object in a data
table you should be able to pull video, images and sound into your
user front-end to your database.  (Although I've only tried this for
bitmaps at present.)

Richard Gerrard
Registrar, TorontoHistorical Board
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