Microsoft Access DBMS

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Microsoft Access is a DBMS (Database Management System) that combines the relational Microsoft Jet Database Engine (Jet) with a graphical user interface and software-development tools.

The Jet is a database engine on which several Microsoft products have been built. A database engine is the underlying component of a database, a collection of information stored on a computer in a systematic way. Microsoft Access and C# have used Jet as their underlying database engine.

It is a member of the Microsoft Office suite of applications. Access has the look and feel of other Microsoft Office products, including its layout and navigational aspects. That is where the similarity ends. Access has an .mdb extension by default, whereas Microsoft Word has the .doc extension. Although this has changed in Access 2007 where the extension is now an accdb extension.

Access can use data stored in Access/Jet, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, or any ODBC-compliant data container. It supports some object-oriented techniques but falls short of being a fully object-oriented development tool.