Database Access and Strong Typing

Paul Vicks, Technical Lead of Visual Basic.Net at Microsoft writes on the shortcomings of strongly typed language:

One of the places where this is most evident, I think, is in the data access space. As anyone who’s used a data-intensive application from Excel to Access to FoxPro to SQL Server can tell you, data is extremely flexible when it comes to typing. A lot of data out there is only semi-typed and as you work with data it frequently needs to change type (and shape, as you add and remove columns). Strongly typed systems often times have a hell of a time dealing with this flexibility, and so it comes as no surprise that pretty much every single application I listed above takes a weakly-typed approach (some more than others) when working with data.

This is a surprising admission that Microsoft had pushed .Net too far into the Enterprise space while emphasizing the same-ness of VB.net vs C#. Instead, VB.net should have been pushed harder on it’s suitability as a data access language.
Given that Enterprise space has been all about handling data, the mismatch between language and business requirements are painfully obvious. In my estimates, it takes at least twice the effort to modify a DB application written in C# compared with one in Access, where there are table changes or precision changes.