DB Help

[stoutfellow]

I'm rather annoyed by Microsoft's plans as regards Office (or, more specifically, Access), so I've downloaded OpenOffice, in hopes of building my library and finances databases on that platform. However, I'm finding the documentation difficult to work with. Just setting up the first form is giving me fits; for my Finances database, I start with a dashboard form, not tied to any table or query, which provides me with some immediately-needed data and allows me to shift to other, table-tied forms. OO Base seems reluctant to let me do that. (There are hints that I need to create that form with the OO word processor, which, whatthehell?

Does anyone a) know how to get decent docs for OO, or b) know of a decent, user-friendly, not-too-complicated DB environment, preferable as easy to work with as Access?

Comments

[graydon]

I consider Access something of a horror, so this is not necessarily going to be useful to you, but if you want an open source analog to Access that's going to be SQLite. (There are a stack of other options, but that's probably the closest. I don't think you want to learn REST and XQuery and build a hierarchical back end for a web service. :)

The GUI front end options are several. I haven't got much sense of what you like, but DBeaver might be interesting.

OO is very very Object-Oriented; the thing that does the class of object (such as forms) will be one thing, and maybe not the thing you expect.

Due to strange machinations you're likely to get better results from Libre Office (the fork Oracle does not own) than Open Office. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWU0WdMJ2Kw is Very Old but may be interesting.

[stoutfellow]

Thanks. I'm looking at the SQLite download page, and I'm not sure what I should grab. I'm guessing the precompiled 64-bit binaries for Windows is one piece I need, perhaps the only piece; is there anything else I'll need? I'll probably go with DBeaver for the front end. (I've also downloaded LibreOffice, but I'm not entirely pleased with it so far.)

[graydon]

I would get the binaries and the tools. The tools are a just-in-case; having the command line status tools available is probably not necessary but if they're wanted they'll be very wanted.

I don't think you need anything but the dll. It may be useful to know that the presumed use cases for SQLite involve a lot of passing whole databases of some-other-application configuration information around.

Libreoffice is just different enough from Openoffice to be sometimes very annoying, yeah. It does seem to have a much better bug fix and development rate, though. However, if you're headed at DBeaver and SQLite, I'm not sure you need any version of OO Base.

[stoutfellow]

Thanks again. My quarrel with LibreOffice is probably idiosyncratic, and I'll keep it around until I convince myself that SQLite/DBeaver does what I want. Odds look good on that, from what I've seen.