Hi Jonathon On 9/11/08, jonathon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 21:43, mike moller wrote: > .... > What MS Access, when included with MSO offers, is a user experience > that is very nlike, and different from that of the typical database > engine. What is missing from OOo, and most other database engines, is > a single tool that provides a user experience akin to that provided by > MS Access. Hey! I won't disagree with that at all. Access grew long ago as a personal desktop tool to compete with the likes of DBase and it had as advantage at that time that it was one of the few that offered a genuine RDBMS implementation rather than a bunch of clipped-on bits that strived to bring an earlier non-relational product into the "proper" relational era. MS's first attempts were pretty awful but in due course by the late 1990s they came up with something which wasn't too bad as a personal computing tool alongside the rest of the single user apps in Office. Where it later came to grief, and rightly earned the scorn of professional multi-user database developers was in the attempts to grow it into a multi-user system. They kludged around with having multiple "Jet" engines sited on each client machine to process a shared dataset on some file server somewhere. They also made a half hearted attempt to offer a proper client/server model based on MSDE which was simply a small configuration SQL Server with a bunch of ultilities missing from it - that one might have succeeded but for the fact that MS seemed to give up on the whole idea after a year or two.
Notwithstanding all that history there came to be a substantial body of 'lay' users who grew out of doing everything in Excel spreadsheets and built personal Db apps of one sort or another using Access. Those sort of applications have little or no appeal to professional programmers who will push for "real" RDBMS packages every time and will be quite happy to recode their apps in java or whatever. However that 'lay' user constituency would have every expectation that a personal applications suite like OOo should cater to their needs for growing easily and graciously out of Access just as they find they can do to get out from Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc. There's where the problem lies with Base and it really doesn't matter much to those users whether the database engine is the present HSq? or SQLlite or anything else. Unfortunately the direction that we, the technically literate, feel happiest to drive the product along (good quality multi-user Db engine, modern OO programming language, client/server separation ...) just doesn't cut it for the natural constituency of users for the DataBase component of OOo. > >b) also in a more subtle way by being directed by consensus among a > technically focused group (from those willing resources) as to what items > should get priority. > > > The direction is more likely to come from Sun, than from consensus. > (Disclaimer, I am more convinced than ever, that including SQLite, > rather than Base, would have been the all round better choice.) > I think we'll disagree on this one although obviously Sun's influence is significant - to me the real issue is up in my main piece above > > >hence for example the disastrous (from a typical Access user's point of > view) absence of the DoCmd or its like. > > > That type of database manipulation is expected to be done by using a > programming language like Java, or Python. > something about dragging horses to water applies here! per my main piece above that simply doesn't do it for the constituency that OOo is trying to capture > d) That I believe carries through to low volumes of postings on the > OOBase specific discussion forums and > e) similarly it limits even more severely the size of the "coalition > of the willing" who work at developing OOBase. > > To an extent, that is true. > > I think the bigger issue is that to use Base in the same way that > Access is used, one literally needs to write a program in Java, PERL, > Python, or similar language. > ref above :-) cheers -- Mike Moller Lallybroch Alpacas New Zealand www.lallybroch.co.nz --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
