[RobinL]

Agreed! The first piece of software I built was a simple inventory and sales management system, around 2000. I was 16 and it was just about my first experience programming.

It was for school, and I recently found the write up and was surprised how well the system worked.

Ever since I've marvelled at how easy it was to build something highly functional that could incorporate complex business logic, and wished there was a more modern equivalent.

[spockz]

Maybe a combination of AirTable and PowerBI/open-source alternative? Or just ms access backed by a proper database?

[jon-wood]

Grist[1] is great for this stuff, at first glance its a spreadsheet but that spreadsheet is backed by a SQLite database and you can put an actual UI on top of it without leaving the tool, or you can write full blown plugins in Javascript and HTML if you need to go further than that.

[1] https://www.getgrist.com/

[fsagx]

Access as a front end for mssqlserver ran great in a small shop. Seems like there was a wizard that imported the the access tables easily into sqlserver.

I've not seen anything as easy to use as the Access visual query builder and drag-n-drop report builder thing.