PeterPanic Posted July 18, 2003 Report Share Posted July 18, 2003 Hi all! I'm looking for a DB application or programming environment similar to MS Access on windows. Of course it should be open source and free :-) [Kylix by Borland isn't...] - The whole thing should work without first setting up a SQL-Server or simialr, because I want to write simple applications that every user can open/start immediately. I looked at QT and Glade 2, but they need a server, Kylix costs money and the big Office packages don't come with a DB as MS Office does - not even OpenOffice. Can anybody help? Thanks. Peter Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sarah31 Posted July 19, 2003 Report Share Posted July 19, 2003 look on freshmeat.net. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PeterPanic Posted July 19, 2003 Author Report Share Posted July 19, 2003 thanks, but they got 1600 or so programs in their database corner, ... Can you recommend anything? I can't see any way to find out which one fits for me, so I'd have to download 1600 programs and test them :? I'm used to Ms access, but want to learn C/C++, too, know pascal and Perl and lots of other (long forgotten) languages... What I'm looking for: A way to write an application that can access and manipulate local database files directly (with its own engine) via SQL or a similar query language. Without a SQL/ODBC/JDBC server running in the background... Just a "simple" file access... I wonder if I should program it myself using CSV or XML, but I think it's quite a lot of work to manage indexes and keys yourself... Hmmm.... Any other suggestions, perhaps? (Am I in the right forum for such a question?) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sitor Posted July 22, 2003 Report Share Posted July 22, 2003 Hi, I'm looking for such a solution myself. I'm converting from Windows to Mandrake at the moment, and one of the pains I have is the conversion of an M$ Access DB I use. I found out that in OOo you can create dBase format DB's. That is already something but not good enough for a non programmer like me. It is impossible to link tables in queries (apparently a restriction of the format). For you it might work, as there is a way around with some SQL statement. For the rest, OOo has all the forms and queries and stuff that M$ Access does. For integration with spreadsheets its even much better. If you're interested , you can find more info on http://dba.openoffice.org/ and more specifically on the dBase stuff on http://homepage.ntlworld.com/garryknight/l...ux/oodbase.html and (if you understand some french) on http://logiciels-libres-cndp.ac-versailles...bureautique/db/. Hope this helps. If you find anything else that does not require programming, let us know. I'm still looking for a better solution. Ciao, Sitor Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PeterPanic Posted July 27, 2003 Author Report Share Posted July 27, 2003 I'm still searching... Perhaps someone else can help? (In the meantime I'm trying to get comfortable with PostGreSQL in QT3... Asking about my other problems with this in an extra posting) Bye, PeterPanic Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sitor Posted July 29, 2003 Report Share Posted July 29, 2003 Hi, In the mean time I found that there is an effort ongoing to make M$ Access DB's accessible on Linux. It is called MDB Tools. You can find the project at http://sourceforge.net/projects/mdbtools and http://mdbtools.sourceforge.net/. It includes an ODBC driver for mdb DB's, so it might be that you could administer the mdb's from within OpenOffice.org with it. If not, it allows to export the data and (if the target knows that kind of functionality) queries, reports, forms to other DB's like PostGreSQL. The problem I have with it is that the it does not run on Mandrake 9.1 due to dependencies issues, at least not when you install from the rpm. I forced the rpm to be installed anyway and what I saw was great (more or less the functionality from M$ Access, just less goodlooking. However when I tried to use it, it crashed. I'm still a newbie, so I'm not going to go the recompilation route (don't even know if that would solve the dependency issues). I read in some post that in Mandrake 9.0 it did work OK, so I might try to install a Virtual Machine with it. If I can find the time,... If someone tries out, let us know your experiences. Thanks. Ciao, Sitor Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted July 29, 2003 Report Share Posted July 29, 2003 Its a real downer but I have to admit i havn't seen ANYTHING that competes with Access for RAD. I used to be a bin fan of Access becuase of this... but as with most M$ tools I learned my lesson the hard way. Look on M$ products like free drugs from a new dealer ... they hook you in first then make it very difficult for you to leave. Getting DATA out of access is pretty simple, The way I do it (which is actually reverse logic but works) is to create a DSN in windows to and oracle or mysql DB. then create a linked table inside (I know oracle but Im sure mysql will work too) oracle. CREATE DATABASE_LINK mytable as SELECT * from (dsn) Once you have the data visible in oracle I then use CREATE TABLE MY TABLE AS select * from mytable But this isn't actually the point, im just illustrating getting the data out is easy. What you miss are the forms. We had a similar query a whileback about the M$Office support for Crossover office. I emailed them professionally asking if they were really running access or just emulating it. They haven't answered ! I spent so long rebuilding the forms I wouldn't touch access with a 10' pole now. I think the best tools are mainly webbased. This seems to be the future .. Some of my old favorites are using the PERL::DBI and PERL::DBDxxx This works transparently so you can use a flatfile or berkley DB as the db. ie. PERL::DBDcsv You can use gtk or Qt widgits straight from Glade or Kdevelop and if you are carefull with your coding hardly any changes need making if you change the actual database. You need to be strict and use ANSI SQL which is a bit dated but ... php is also good but its obviously server side... I haven't got experience but I'd like to :-) Hope this is of some use. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sitor Posted July 29, 2003 Report Share Posted July 29, 2003 Look earlier in the threat. OpenOffice.org (OOo) gives the same RAD possibilities as M$ Access, but you have to recreate all forms, queries, etc. So if you are looking for the same stuff as Access but on Linux and in Open Source, and you are willing to work with PostGreSQL or MySQL DB's anyway, you can just use OOo. That is the way I will go. I'm not comftortable with programming enough to go ahead with Perl or PHP. Ciao, Wim Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest sas Posted July 30, 2003 Report Share Posted July 30, 2003 i'm doubt it (but i've never tried them) but would GnomeDB or Kexi be any good? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cannonfodder Posted July 30, 2003 Report Share Posted July 30, 2003 You might want to search under freshmeat with the terms database engine I saw a few... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted July 30, 2003 Report Share Posted July 30, 2003 I have to admit I haven't tried it but I have to say, Ive never seen anything approaching ease of use compared to Access. If it wasn't for the problems afterwards .... The problem, like most M$ solutions is that its simple for someone who doesn't know anything about database programming to make a database. However database programming is an art in itself regarding optimisation. The real problem comes once your happy with your prototype. Your users like the interface etc.... then its an abolute nightmare to actually salvage anything except the data. If it was just a test version your fake test data isn't that useful :) Problem is it scales like a pig.... so once you go live it just dies... I hope the OO prototyper works well but I doubt it will be as easy as Access. The reason is Access is only easy because its a complete compromise based on a database engine that is truly crap and M$ know this because they want you to use SQL server. The problem is ... well everything about it ... it's the typical 'you can check out anytime but you can never leave scenario'. It is a lot more work to actually make a RAD system that works so easily with the user knowing little about databases and still produce a reasonablly well optimised database. If the database isn't optimised then the problem is that it won't scale without rewriting so you lose all the advantages of RAD. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PeterPanic Posted August 2, 2003 Author Report Share Posted August 2, 2003 Thanks for your suggestions. I'll try a bit and tell you about successes afterwards. A similar question: Does anyone of you know about a file based database library? I'm going to write a game which is using lots of data taht has to be sorted and accessed really fast. But I don't want to make the user/player of my game install a db engine, which isn't that "MS" easy for everybody. So my program should work on itself when installed. How would YOU do this? Bye. PeterPanic Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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