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SQL Vs. Access for Learning Database Concepts?
Jonathan Hamilton asks: "I work at the School of Communications for a major state University. The IT Department for the University (the same people that won't let us have a firewall, and use IIS and Exchange) is trying to talk my boss into switching from using SQL for teaching database concepts to MS Access. My coworkers and I think they are nuts. I have googled for pages comparing the two and can't come up with anything. I know some of the reasons why it is a bad idea, but I can't find any references. Help!" The mantra here is: the best tool for the best job. Is Access a suitable tool for teaching database concepts to students? If not, what would you use instead, and why?
Access has the most overhead according to this.
Here's a link to a discussion where the poster states that Access is not good for large installations...
You might check with IBM (DB2), Oracle, MySQL, or Postgres for help as well...I'm sure they'ld be more than happy to help.
Cross platform compatability. Students with Windoze, Linux, or Macs can run most SQL servers...not so with Access...
And then there's the corporate settings...most companies are using DB2, Oracle, MySql, or something that is ANSI-SQL compatible...not M$ SQL...
You also have more utilities and help available for SQL than Access...
There's GUI tools, schema browsers, etc all available for SQL...
If your school runs its website on a *NIX server, you could up-play the compatibility angle...you know, senior projects and such...
One major advantage of SQL is that all of the companies/organizations that I mentioned are free or have a free educational version...I doubt M$ does...
The relational model, as invented by E. F. Codd, is heavily grounded in mathematics and set theory, and exists independently of higher-level access interfaces such as SQL.
You can certainly teach people to create and use databases through Access or SQL, in the same way you can (to pick a randomly politically incorrect analogy) teach people to create bombs without telling them how chemical reactions work, but then you're not telling them the full story.
Knowing what a Cartesian product is, or what normalization and the five normal forms are, or what relational integrity is -- all that lets you design better, more flexible and extensible schemas, and interact more intelligently with your data. I know Access developers who don't have a clue about the relational model, and as a result design terrible applications.
As a starting point, I recommend the books by C. J. Date, in particular An Introduction to Database Systems, 7th Edition ; his book The Database Relational Model: A Retrospective Review and Analysis: A Historical Account and Assessment of E. F. Codd's Contribution to the Field of Database Technology also looks very interesting.
As an aside, what's surprising is how many people consider Codd's original ideas outdated. The fact is, his ideas surpass what's implemented in database systems at the moment. SQL is a weak language (and SQL99, with its silly object orientation extensions, hasn't made it any better). Database vendors routinely expose underlying implementation issues to the user. They tightly couple physical representation with logical representation, leading, for example, to many people avoiding normalization because it incurs a significant performance penalty with most databases. RDBMSs today are crap.