To my surprise and delight I read that an adminsitrator can import (nearly directly) an Access 2007 database into a sharepoint site. Automagically, the database in transformed into lists and views with some table lookup thrown in for good measure. With Access 2007 installed on the client machine, even the forms and what not can still be reused.
To me… this sounds to good to be true.
Has anyone actually dones this? With all this good news, where is the bad stuff and pitfalls to this. Depending on the size of the database, wouldn't this some how "gum up the works" in the SharPoint database?
Sources:
http://madhurahuja.blogspot.com/2007/01/adding-data-to-sharepoint-l-ists-in.html
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointadmin/thread/17745835-a861-4984-9f44-7291fdae7d07
Best Answer
Sharepoint has no referential integrity. This is the main reason I can't see it as being usable for any kind of database operations, since without RI, you've just got a collection of lists, and not a database. This doesn't mean Sharepoint is not good for some things, but replacing an Access/Jet database entirely seems to me one of the obvious things it is not viable for.