Microsoft Corp did indeed launch its Access database product late Monday and accompanied it with FoxPro 2.5. It describes Access as a full-featured and fully relational database management system that reads and updates local and remote data and indexes by directly attaching to dBase III and dBase III Plus, dBase IV, Paradox 3.0 and 3.5, and Btrieve formats, as well as data from Microsoft SQL Server through Open Data Base Connectivity, with links to Oracle7 planned to follow shortly. The idea is that users with different products within a workgroup or company can share data easily, on individual workstations, across a network or in a client-server configuration. As well as directly attaching to data files, Microsoft Access imports data to and exports from Microsoft FoxPro, Excel, Lotus 1-2-3, and fixed-length and delimited ASCII formats. Additional Open Data Base drivers for directly attaching to FoxPro, Sybase Inc SQL Server, Digital Equipment Corp Rdb and other databases are planned for next year. It will be $100 until January and thereafter $500 for the first user, $425 for each subsequent user. The Access Developer Kit, available first quarter 1993, will be $500. FoxPro 2.5 for Windows and FoxPro 2.5 for MS-DOS are scheduled to be available in first quarter of 1993. In FoxPro 2.5, the query optimisation of the Rushmore system is extended to enable more areas of the product to benefit, making it up to three times faster than FoxPro 2.0. It will be available under Macintosh System and Unix as well as Windows, with data and application code sharable in all environments without modifying any code. It is $500 for the first user, $425 for each subsequent one.
