[clue-tech] MS Access

[Brian Gibson]

A sqlite-backed web application was the first thing that came to mind when the problem was presented.

Rails is awesome, but it is a framework and would not work out of the box like Access and its form creator.   Rails defaults to sqlite for its database backend.  Works great for development purposes, but I'd be hesitant about using it for concurrent multiple users.  Rails uses a DB for object relational mapping and is mostly database agnostic as long as you don't depend on a database-specific feature, so it wouldn't be too hard to switch DB backends if necessary.  Rails has a feature called migrations and keeps track of the database schema which makes switching easy.  In fact, a common scenario is to use sqlite for development and mysql for deployment.





----- Original Message ----
From: David L. Anselmi <anselmi at anselmi.us>
To: CLUE technical discussion <clue-tech at cluedenver.org>
Sent: Monday, April 13, 2009 7:27:39 PM
Subject: Re: [clue-tech] MS Access

David L. Willson wrote:
> 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 looked at OOo.  I hooked it to PostgreSQL easily enough.  But I needed a form that could insert into multiple tables and I didn't have time to fiddle with it.  What can it do now?

I read a little about Rails.  Figured a web framework might make "slap a form on this schema" easy.  Rails seems more general purpose than that.  But I think that a web version of Access would be a killer app. Everyone I know needs that, but uses Excel instead (one or two know what a relation is and then they use Access).  But they all suffer because they can't put the front end in front of multiple users.  So I may wind up figuring out how to do manual replication of Access.

If OOo is close to Access for making forms, does hooking it to SQLite give you the rest of Access?  Just need a macro to create the schema stuff.

> I have a client breathing down my neck about their database upgrade
> and I just can't bring myself to invest more of their money and my
> time in the current MS Access front end.

Why?  If you have it hooked to a real DB what does it suck at?

Dave

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