I was part of a discussion on UtterAccess in mid-January which got hijacked a bit about the decline of Access. As George stated it:

What happens at 2 Gb?

... the real damage done by lack of commitment has been the erosion of confidence among customers and users ...

The discussion made me look further into a couple of my previous posts, such as:

What's Is Access' Position: Thriving, Alive, Dying, Dead?

Here’s a question I put to you, How is Access fairing today in your humble opinion? Is Access: Thriving as it should, growing in the world Alive, but not progressing On a downward spiral towards its demise Dead, already in its cemetery plot

Does Microsoft Access Remain A Good Choice As A Development Platform?

I know I’ve touched upon this subject in the past, but it’s been another rough couple of weeks for Access and I wanted to see, once again, were people stand on the subject. So, I put it to you: Is Microsoft Access truly a good choice as a development platform today (in 2021-2022)? Historically, I…

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and made me want to examine whether there was/is a quantifiable decline in Access interest.

Stacked Exchange (SE) provides access to their data and they are one of the biggest forum providers in the world.  So, I set off to see what I could find out from their data.

Using the Stacked Exchange Data Explorer and the documentation

Database schema documentation for the public data dump and SEDE

Stack Exchange releases “data dumps” of all its publicly available content roughly every three months via archive.org, and also makes that information queryable over the Internet at the Stack Excha...

it didn’t take long to get a clear picture of Access’ rise and fall.

The Stacked Exchange Access Statistics

I built a simple query to determine the number of questions posted per year and the results were

So we can clearly see a yearly increase through 2013 and things started to stagnate for a few years, then start to decline around 2016 and consistently every year thereafter.

The Bigger Picture

This however got me wondering about the more general picture of databases, not just Access.  So I set out to review more well known databases to see how Access fared in the grander scheme of things.  So I started running the same query for other common database and I got the following picture.

Looking at the bigger picture, we can see a common decline amongst many of the big databases with the major exception of PostgreSQL!

I wasn’t surprised to see MS Access & SQL Server decline, but thought that Azure SQL Database questions would have significantly increased over the same period, which simply is not the case.

Isladogs’ (Colin’s) Data

If you review the original thread I mentioned at the beginning of this article, Colin posted the statistics (taken from https://www.utteraccess.com/topics/2062462/posts/2792955) from another forum.

Once again, we see the same downwards trend, but in this instance it appeared much earlier.  As of 2008, we start to see a consistent decline.

Other MS Office Apps?

I was interested in also comparing Access’ trend against the other Microsoft Office Applications and so I pulled the data for each of them, giving:

Graphically we can see a noticeable decline in both Access and Excel.

Empirically, we see a decline across the board for all application starting around 2017-2018.  The real question is why?  What does this mean, if anything?

What’s Your Opinion?

So, are these trends telling in your opinion?  Are they indicative of a shift away from certain technologies? Away from Microsoft Office?

OR

Is it normal to see questions decline since so many online resources now exists and people simply don’t need to ask as many questions?

OR

Are people simply using different forums and these forums are simply loosing their popularity?

More To Come, Maybe

I’ve asked UtterAccess if they’d share their yearly post counts with me as I think it would offer an interesting perspective, see if the same tendency is true there, or not. I know that I’ve noticed a decline, but is it of the same magnitude as what is observed on SE?

I’m still waiting to hear back, but will update this post should they be willing to share such information.