Your complete guide to escaping Microsoft Access
Practical, no-nonsense guides for IT professionals, consultants, and business owners who need to move beyond Access — without breaking their business in the process.
7 books covering every stage of your migration journey
Why your Access database needs to change — and what it actually takes. The complete planning guide with honest assessments of every migration option.
Available Now — $19.99 Learn more →SQL Server vs. MySQL vs. MariaDB vs. PostgreSQL — feature-by-feature comparison, benchmarks, cost analysis, and recommendations for your situation.
Coming Soon Learn more →Step-by-step migration guide. SSMA walkthrough, T-SQL conversion, ODBC setup, and solutions for the 50 most common issues.
Coming Soon Learn more →Complete migration walkthrough using MySQL Workbench and manual methods. MySQL-specific gotchas and performance tuning.
Coming Soon Learn more →MySQL-compatible migration with MariaDB-specific features and advantages. Cost-effective open-source path.
Coming Soon Learn more →Migration guide for the most standards-compliant open-source database. psycopg2 setup, dialect differences, and query optimization.
Coming Soon Learn more →Quick-reference troubleshooting guide for post-migration problems. Find the fix fast when something goes wrong.
Coming Soon Learn more →A.F. Cross has spent decades working with database systems — from the "quick little Access databases" that grew into mission-critical systems to the enterprise platforms that replaced them.
This series was born from years of seeing the same migrations go wrong in the same ways, and from the realization that most available guidance is either vendor marketing or too abstract to be actionable.
These books are written for the people who actually have to do the work — not the ones who approve the budget.