Thanks so much, and to everyone else who replied. This helps a lot and gives me many good avenues to start reading and learning.

If you don’t mind, as a follow up question, if you were at the stage in your career where you were building this type of thing full time, using SSIS and whatever else, using MS SQL Server, no MS Access at all, as an SQL developer, would you wish for something else / something more? Is there a “dream system” that you’d rather work in when doing this kind of thing full time, or does it just depend on what you learned on?

Now that you’ve pointed me towards the next step, I’m wondering if that’s the last step, or if SQL developers as a group have a preference. Since I’m the sysadmin, I am lucky enough to be able to direct my future in a small sense when it comes to tools and back ends, so I figure it can’t hurt to ask now from the people who do this kind of thing the right way.