Microsoft Office Access 2003

Microsoft Office Access 2003
Microsoft Office Access is the mostly widely used relational DBMS for the Microsoft
Windows environment. It is a typical PC-based DBMS capable of storing, sorting, and
retrieving data for a variety of applications. Access provides a Graphical User Interface
(GUI) to create tables, queries, forms, and reports, and tools to develop customized
database applications using the Microsoft Office Access macro language or the Microsoft
Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) language. In addition, Office Access provides programs,
called Wizards, to simplify many of the processes of building a database application
by taking the user through a series of question-and-answer dialog boxes. It also
provides Builders to help the user build syntactically correct expressions, such as those
required in SQL statements and macros. Office Access supports much of the SQL standard
presented in Chapters 5 and 6, and the Microsoft Open Database Connectivity
(ODBC) standard, which provides a common interface for accessing heterogeneous SQL
databases, such as Oracle and Informix. We discuss ODBC in more detail in Appendix E.
To start the presentation of Microsoft Office Access, we first introduce the objects that can
be created to help develop a database application.