[clue-tech] MS Access

[Jed S. Baer]

On Mon, 13 Apr 2009 17:41:06 -0600 (MDT)
David L. Willson wrote:

> /me hopes that got someone's attention.

Fortunately, I have an electric stain remover for my carpet. :)

> Anyway, does anyone here have an interest in, and some ability toward,
> replacing MS Access apps with open sourcey stuph?  I want a hacking
> partner.  I think the direction to go is OpenOffice.org documents over
> PostgreSQL or MySQL, but I'm not sure.

I will comment that the last time I waded into the waters of hooking up
OO.org Base to an ODBC database, I came away well and truly frustrated.
After wasting several hours trying to find complete dox that worked,
installing, uninstalling, and reinstalling various Java thingies
(connector?) and ODBC libraries, I threw my hands up in disgust.

This is something that, IMHO (and it might well have gotten better in the
last several months) is a gaping hole in the world of Free Software. I
think it was 1999 or something when I was able to <RETCH> hook an Excel
spreadsheet up to an Oracle view without much trouble at all.

This sounds like an ideal thing for a hacking-society style get together.
IIRC, last time we floated that idea, we couldn't agree on a location.

jed