Real World Microsoft Access Database Protection and Security 

Foreword - Published with permission of Apress Publishing

By Peter Vogel   Editor of the Smart Access newsletter from Pinnacle Publishing

Right now, for software developers, it would be hard to imagine a more important topic than security. If you’re reading this book, then you are one of those people who know that Access is a great tool for building database applications. In this book, Garry Robinson brings these two topics together to show you how to create secure Access applications. If you’re an Access developer, a database administrator, or an IT manager responsible for Access application development, you probably need this book. If you’re a consultant who’s creating Access applications for paying clients, then you definitely need this book.

I first “met” Garry through the pages of Smart Access. Garry was this working consultant over in Australia who was building great applications in Access and sending me proposals for articles. Garry’s first proposal described a data mining package he had built for some clients that he was marketing (ironically enough, many of Garry’s clients at that time were in the mining industry). Over the years, I continued to get more article proposals from Garry. They were all great, and they all found their way into Smart Access.

Why were Garry’s proposals so great? Three reasons:

1.    They described genuinely useful techniques for Access developers.
2.    Garry frequently packaged the tools so that other Access developers could use  them as utilities.
3.     All the code reflected an understanding of what it takes to create great software in the real world.

So, now, Garry is a contributing editor for Smart Access, and we communicate frequently by email. I even managed to make it over to Australia once and met Garry in the flesh. Garry and his wife squired my wife and me around Sydney for a day. It was great. I thought we bonded.

But Garry has never written an article for Smart Access on security, a subject that he, unbeknown to me, knows a great deal about. Now I find out why—he was saving up all that material for this book. You can’t trust anybody. Which, I guess, is the point of this book.

And Garry knows a lot about security. Normally, discussions of Access security start and end with workgroup security. It turns out that there’s a lot more to consider. Garry begins, for instance, by discussing the security issues around common Access practices that you’ve already been using (for example, in Chapter 4, where Garry discusses splitting databases and using the AutoExec macro). In Chapter 8, where Garry discusses workgroup security, he begins by telling you why it’s important and where it fits among all the security-related actions that you must take. Garry also goes into workgroup security in depth, discussing security for topics that others ignore: Data Access Pages, user surveillance, and menus. Even with workgroup security completely covered, Garry isn’t done—I’ve been using Access for more than a decade now, and I had never even thought about integrating Windows security with my Access applications in the way that Garry shows in this book. This book is for the real Access programmer: Though Garry covers material relevant to Access Data Projects, the focus remains on Access itself and the Access developer’s main tool—the Jet database.
What I really appreciated about this book is that Garry covers these issues from the point of view of the real-world Access developer, the database administrator, and the IT manager. Throughout the book, Garry provides the sample code and the step-by-step instructions that you need to implement these techniques, along with the perspective to understand what’s important to you.

If you apply all the techniques described in this book, you may never know whether they work. That’s the problem with security: No news is good news. But if you ever have a security breach and one of Garry’s techniques would have prevented the problem—well, try explaining that to your boss/client/customer.

I’m going to keep this book near at hand. You should, too

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