You can use other data access solutions if you are writing your application with Visual Basic or another web programming language like C#. Data Access Objects (DAO) allow OLE Automation clients^[1] to access ODBC and Jet databases.

Jet is the database engine used by Microsoft Access. You can also use Remote Data Objects (RDO) to access remote OLE DB and ODBC databases. Data remoting is a technology that you can use to transport data from the DBMS to the client machine.
The data is manipulated on the client machine and returned to the DBMS at a later time without maintaining a persistent connection. An application communicates via RDO to the ODBC Application Programming Interface and provides access to some features not available to DAO.

Access is a very flexible development tool because not only can you link to various flat files, but you can also link to databases and use Access as the front-end tool to work with the data stored on the server. The tool of choice for the task is the (ODBC) Open Database Connectivity. Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) is an interface allowing you to access data stored in various relational and non-relational database management systems such as SQL Server, ORACLE, dBase, and Excel.
The ODBC provides a vendor-neutral, open means of accessing data stored in personal computers and different databases. An ODBC is based on a (CLI) Call Level Interface specification of the SQL Access Group. The ODBC interface was first created in 1992 and became a part of the national SWL standard in 1995.
The strength and benefit of ODBC is that it provides a universal data access interface and allows you to use different database environments without the need to learn different application programming languages. With ODBC, you can simultaneously access, view, and modify data stored in an assortment of database platforms because the ODBC re-codes the SQL queries you write in Access and translates them to the specific dialect of the database you are accessing.

[1] OLE Automation Client: An application that accesses objects exposed by another application.