Microsoft Access as a Weapon of War
- by Damon Armstrong
A while ago (probably a decade ago, actually) I saw a report on a tracking system maintained by a U.S. Army artillery control unit. This system was capable of maintaining a bearing on various units in the field to help avoid friendly fire. I consider the U.S. Army to be the most technologically advanced fighting force on Earth, but to my terror I saw something on the title bar of an application displayed on a laptop behind one of the soldiers they were interviewing: Tracking.mdb Oh yes. Microsoft Office Suite had made it onto the battlefield. My hope is that it was just running as a front-end for a more proficient database (no offense Access people), or that the soldier was tracking something else like KP duty or fantasy football scores. But I could also see the corporate equivalent of a pointy-haired boss walking into a cube and asking someone who had piddled with Access to build a database for HR forms. Except this pointy-haired boss would have been a general, the cube would have been a tank, and the HR forms would have been targets that, if something went amiss, would have been hit by a 500lb artillery round. Hope that solider could write a good query
