However, look deeper into those criticisms and you'll find that Microsoft is not dumbing down databases for commercial reasons the engineers think about and justify their decisions. What you often hear as criticism from information systems circles is that Access is too liberally violating RDB design principles for the benefit of novice users and comfort of use. In the background, though, Microsoft has a team of experienced engineers working on the underlying tech. The RDBMS side offers very user-friendly ways of working on your relations, queries, views, and reports.
It's not just a complete relational database system, but thanks to its powerful form designer and programming interfaces, also a great rapid application development tool. Microsoft Access is, unusually for a Microsoft product, pretty much completely without competition, and has been for way back into its past.
