Case study · Live demo

Still on Access? Have a look at this instead.

Access ran the business for twenty years. Now it fights you every time you touch it — the licences, the .mdb sharing headaches, the "let me RDP in" support calls, the VBA nobody wants to maintain. Here's what your app could look like today: a clean web front-end on a proper database, open in any browser, no software to install, no per-seat cost.

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A working Sakila film-rental application — dashboard, catalog, customers, cashier checkout. Full read and write access, no login. Try adding a customer, editing a film, checking out a rental. Data resets on demand — safe to try anything.

Open the demo

What's in the demo

The demo runs on Sakila — the classic MySQL sample database, a fake DVD rental store with 1,000 films, 200 actors, 600 customers, and 16,000 rentals. Realistic-scale data, public sample so no privacy concerns.

Dashboard — headline stats, top films by rental count, revenue by category
Films browser — 1,000 titles with search, category filter, rating filter, pagination
Film detail + edit — full record with cast, inventory status, recent rentals; edit title/rating/rate/duration
Customer browser — 600 customers, add new, edit existing, delete
Customer detail — profile, contact, lifetime value, complete rental history
Cashier — pick a customer, add films to a cart, check out. Records real rental and payment rows.

What Access looked like. What this looks like.

The Access era

Runs only on Windows with Access installed
Per-seat licence for every user
File corruption when two people save at once
VBA nobody left in the company understands
Can't touch it from a phone or Mac
"Send me the .mdb, I'll email it back" support
Runtime licencing, split-database gymnastics

This

Any browser, any device, any OS
No client software, no licence per user
Real database — concurrent writes just work
Code your next developer can actually read
Works from the office, home, and on the road
You send a URL, not a file
Modern security, backups, and access control

How it's built

This demo is deliberately unfancy. PHP for the backend, MySQL underneath, a few hundred lines of hand-written HTML and CSS on top. No framework, no build step, no JavaScript library. That's on purpose — it's the kind of app a competent developer can pick up and change without archaeology.

For real deployments we'd add role-based logins, audit trails, and a proper deployment pipeline. But the shape stays the same: the database is the source of truth, the browser is the interface, and everything in between is small and understandable.

Migrating from Access is a service we do. We can move your existing app to this pattern in weeks, not months — keeping the workflows your team relies on, dropping the parts that were only there because Access forced them. Get in touch for a scoped estimate.

The technical honest bit

The demo lets you write to the database (adding customers, editing films, checking out rentals). To keep it safe as a public demo, edits go through a database user with only INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE — never CREATE, DROP, or ALTER — and the whole thing can be reset to baseline in one click. Anyone can vandalize the demo data; nothing valuable is at risk.

The interactive parts (add customer, edit film, checkout) use HTMX — a small library that gives you inline-editing and partial page updates without the framework tax. About 14KB. No build step, no React, no npm ecosystem to maintain.

See more of our work

Browse the full portfolio → — 19 tools we've built for clients across Canada.