The way the storage is working on the palm is that you have 3 (now 4 with one for currency.) "tables". I believe they are each considered to be a "database" by palm, but I will call them "tables" as I think it is more accurate in this sense.
One is a listing of accounts, one is a listing of transactions, and the third is a listing of splits. A transaction just records the name of the transaction, and the memo for it. The splits include pointers to the accounts the money came from/went to and a pointer to the transaction. Accounts is the name of all the accounts and their current total value. [And the currency lists the conversion rate between a few different currencies, this is a new feature so I'm not sure exactly how it works.]
The "ease" to go to another db format, is that everything is already split up and referencing eachother. So it is already similar to an RDB. I'm not a true database person, I'm only trying to figure out information for someone else. I'm more sold on the XML format... Actually, I'm mostly sold on using gnucash as the "front-end". But that would restrict people to Linux, and freecoins is supposed to be cross-platform. [At least I haven't heard of anyone that has gotten a cygwin/win32 port of gnucash. If I'm wrong please correct me.].
Again, I'm looking into SQL more for someone else, than because it is my personal favorite. But just telling me that it isn't well supported is enough to give me a little more leverage to push another format.
Thanks for the quick reply,
John
=:->
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
On Mon, 04 Nov 2002 19:19:30 CST, the world broke into rejoicing as
John F Meinel Jr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
Once again I'm here to ask a question for freecoins, the palm record keeping software (http://freecoins.sourceforge.net)...What do you understand "database format" to mean?
Someone believed that gnucash supported a SQL backend instead of using an XML file. Is that true? The reason is that the author and lead developer of freecoins would like to see it connected with a SQL db as a generic conduit. And then have gnucash connect to the same db.
So were they right? Or is that an old, unused feature that isn't supported anymore?
I believe his thought was that since it is already in database format (palm db), it is easier to convert it to another database format, then to try and go back to QIF's or something like that.
John
The way I usually understand it as is as "something totally irrelevant
that the DBMS takes care of so that I don't need to give a rip about
it."
At any rate, the SQL back end does function, at least marginally. It is
not well-maintained, so it doesn't work well at this point.
And it is totally irrelevant that FreeCoins uses "a database" and that
GnuCash can use "a database;" that does nothing to establish that it
will be easy to transfer data back and forth...
--
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