Is Microsoft Access the best free software to build a database?

[MBD]

Hi all,
If I were to create database from the scratch using a free software, would Microsoft Access be my best option?
For further context, my data comes in excel spreadsheets, and unfortunately are in horizontal date format (looking to transpose it as I transition to database).

Data structure example:

Item No	01/09/21	02/09/21	03/09/21	04/09/21	05/09/21	06/09/21
P-2341	33	41	42	47	37	38
C-0891	15	19	21	13	13	21

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

MBD

 

[Joe4]

Access is a good option (as long as you don't have a ton of data that would exceed the 2 GB size maximum).
But to get it to work properly in ANY relational database program, you are probably going to need to normalize your data (your current structure is not normalized, and probably won't work well in any database program).

I suggest you research Relational Database creation and the Rules of Normalization, as you will need to know both in order to create a well-designed database.

 

[MBD]

Thank you for your input, Joe4. I will read up on both topics you mentioned.

When you said 2GB maximum, did you mean per dataset or the whole database?
In effect, I need to create 10 datasets/tables every month of about 10MB each.

If Microsoft Access is not suitable for this purpose, which software would be a better alternative?
Appreciate your help.

 

[RoryA]

When did Access become free?

 

[Joe4]

Thank you for your input, Joe4. I will read up on both topics you mentioned.

When you said 2GB maximum, did you mean per dataset or the whole database?
In effect, I need to create 10 datasets/tables every month of about 10MB each.

If Microsoft Access is not suitable for this purpose, which software would be a better alternative?
Appreciate your help.

It sounds like you should be fine with Access. If you eventually gets millions and millions of rows of data, where size becomes an issue, you can store the data tables in something like SQL and then still continue to use Access as the front-end database (SQL is not free, but MySQL is).

Note that Access databases do tend to "bloat" in size over time, and need to be "Compacted and Repaired" regularly. That is because deleting data does not really delete it from the database until you run a "Compact and Repair". So you will notice that as you delete data, the size of the DB does not get smaller until you do that.