access vs oracle?

Question

Both Access and Oracle are created based on the same relational database model. But they are not quite the same. What is one difference between these two products/

Answer 1

Access is more basic or simple and is more suited for a single user or a very small office. You can create a simple relational database but there are functional limits on how many people can be editing at a time, and what happens when multiple people try to edit the same record at the same time. Access is designed to be fairly small, compact and fast for a few users but is not scalable to be used by a larger workplace. Oracle is designed to be used by many, many simultaneous users at the same time. It's very big and powerful, requires high-powered hardware, and can be scaled out to as big a network of users as you need (providing you have the budget). Both offer nice reporting features but Oracle has workflow modules you can use; you can set it up so that when a certain action is performed, a certain group is notified. For example, if I submit an Oracle-based expense report, when I save the record, my boss gets an email that it's ready for his approval and the record gets added to his Oracle workspace. When he approves it, it gets kicked up to the accounting folks. You can't do this easily in Access.

And Oracle is a LOT more expensive than Access.