A while ago (probably a decade ago, actually) I saw a report on a tracking system maintained by a U.S. Army artillery control unit. This system was capable of maintaining a bearing on various units in the field to help avoid friendly fire. I consider the U.S. Army to be the most technologically advanced fighting force on Earth, but to my terror I saw something on the title bar of an application displayed on a laptop behind one of the soldiers they were interviewing:<\/p>\n
Tracking.mdb<\/strong><\/p>\n Oh yes. Microsoft Office Suite had made it onto the battlefield. My hope is that it was just running as a front-end for a more proficient database (no offense Access people), or that the soldier was tracking something else like KP duty or fantasy football scores. But I could also see the corporate equivalent of a pointy-haired boss walking into a cube and asking someone who had piddled with Access to build a database for HR forms. Except this pointy-haired boss would have been a general, the cube would have been a tank, and the HR forms would have been targets that, if something went amiss, would have been hit by a 500lb artillery round.<\/p>\n Hope that solider could write a good query \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A while ago (probably a decade ago, actually) I saw a report on a tracking system maintained by a U.S. Army artillery control unit. This system was capable of maintaining a bearing on various units in the field to help avoid friendly fire. I consider the U.S. Army to be the most technologically advanced fighting……<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46738,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-3575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/46738"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3575"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3575\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42175,"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3575\/revisions\/42175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3575"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=3575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}