I've looked at AirTable. It is, unfortunately, not MS Access for the web. It's cool, but the two are not analogous.
One of the greatest things about MS Access was that it made it trivially easy to create master-detail forms where a sub-form contains records related to the master record shown in the main form.
I've had this as my startup idea for at least four years now. I'd build a web-based database product that would fit in google apps with the intention of getting bought by google and integrated into google apps.
Even if I didn't make any money on the deal, at least I'd be able to have something better for tracking the progress of the cub scouts awards. It'd also let my wife and me set up the complex budget that we're trying to do right now in spreadsheets.
I bring this up with people who work for small businesses and they all recognize the pain point. Those that are old enough remember the good old days when you could put an Access file on a network share and then run your entire business out of it.
Zoho Creator is probably the closest thing to a web-based Access product that I've seen, and it's still not quite Access. Access occupied a very strange space in between an actual application framework, a database GUI, and an IDE.
I personally would not want to be responsible for security for a web-based Access clone. Enormous attack surface area.
But I think Access is awesome for making and battle-testing prototypes that can eventually become actual CRUD apps. Great intermediate step somewhere in-between e-mailing spreadsheets and building a Rails app, for getting shit done at the office.
Agree 100% on this. To truly replicate Access online, you'll have to provide some sort of scripting interface that is moderately performant. Seems like a complete nightmare.
If you're interested, I've wanted to work on this too. In particular, creating an online, PaaS database service so you can store and manipulate data via SQL queries without needing to setup and maintain (and share across machines) your own sql server. It's something I find myself wishing I had.
The key parts of Access aren't that it can have SQL queries, it's that it (a) has a UI where you can easily edit tables (without worrying much about schemas and so on), (b) has a UI where you can plug tables into WYSIWYG-edited reports, and (c) has a UI where you can plug tables into WYSIWYG-edited forms.
Check out Oracle's Application Express (APEX). I was an MS Access developer way, way back, an Apex is a very close replacement. And, you can use it with the free version of Oracle (XE), which gives you 11GB. Plenty for small projects.
I've been looking for that too. Google Fusion Tables is a bit of what I was looking for, but too limited (and not well supported for general purpose business applications--the main use case was building maps).
Thanks for everyone's replies, I found airtable to be nice and simple for people who want to use a database, fieldbookapp a bit higher end, and APEX too confusing.
However I still can't see how to do the "getting started with SQL" type stuff, for people who don't want to use the command line for everything, but still want to use SQL in not too complex ways, maybe a more friendly version of phpmyadmin (and friends).
