The Access Timebomb: What we found inside a council's 23-year-old database - and why the most dangerous part wasn't the software.

The database file was 340MB. A single phone photo is larger.

But inside that 340MB was the administrative logic of a municipal council going back to the early 2000s. Permit records. Rate calculations. Compliance history. VBA macros nobody had touched in 15 years. Table relationships that made sense in 2003 and were puzzling in 2026.

And one thing nobody had told us upfront:

Three of those macros contained hardcoded rate values from 2011. The rates had changed. The macros hadn't.

The system had been silently applying the wrong calculation to a specific class of permits for years. Nobody had noticed - because nobody had checked. Because nobody thought to check a system that had 'always just worked.'

This is what legacy systems actually look like. Not dramatic. Not obviously broken. Just quietly accumulating risk in fields nobody looks at.

The migration - Access to SQL Server, new web frontend - was the straightforward part.

The archaeology was the real work. Finding the rules. Understanding what was intentional and what was drift. Documenting all of it properly, probably for the first time.

The council now has a system that can be maintained, extended, and handed over. They also have documentation. Which sounds unremarkable - until you realise how rare it is.