Hi Kay, On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 03:58:06PM -0700, Kay Schenk wrote: > Well no doubt this may start a rather heated discussion.
One of my favorites quotes about Base is from Andreas Säger (villeroy on the forums): "The difference between MS Access and Base amounts to several millions of Dollars and more than one decade of development time. Once you got used to MS Access, it is rather unlikely that you will ever be able to work with any other set of database utilities. I wish the AOO team had the balls to remove all the experimental trash while keeping bare important database connectivity for the pros. Since 2006 the whole concept of Base with the embedded HSQLDB and wizards is proven to be completely wrong, wrong, wrong." http://markmail.org/message/izhtpii5li57lnjn > I don't really know who the author is, but, I too, had been giving this a > great deal of thought. Does a user know what any of this really means, for > example. And, including an embedded DB like HSQL puts added responsibility > for that embedded DB on this project. What if Base were strictly a > front-end? > > So, does anyone have any further insights into how many users, if any, > directly use Base to create and use their own individual DBs as opposed to > using the "front-end" capabilities? This is hard too guess. The majority of AOO users are Windows users, so you can asume that the "average user" that tries Base with a MS Office background, is looking for something like MS Access. I guess this was what drove Sun to create the ODB file with embedded db inside. With such an expectation, no wonder this average user gets frustrated with Base. For the whole topic, though it might be interesting to discuss it, IMHO it is completely pointless: look at the history in trunk/main/connectivity trunk/main/dbaccess trunk/main/reportdesign trunk/main/reportbuilder if there is no one to maintain the code, it will end up being dead code, so it's not a matter of "having the balls" (at least not *just* this); it's a matter of knowing the code, or willing to learn it and work on it (be it for removing Base embedded completely, or for fixing Base bugs, or developing Base features). Many mails can be written discussing dropping embedded HSQLDB engine, but at the end who will do this? Given that the not-so-difficult bug for building with Java 7 (it has even the explanation from the HSQLDB developer on the bug, telling how to fix it) didn't find someone to take care of him, removing HSQLDB seems something unrealistic. Just let it die. Regards -- Ariel Constenla-Haile La Plata, Argentina
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