[libreoffice-users] Re: Problems importing an OO database into LO

ptoye wrote
> Glad to hear it. But IMHO Base is just nowhere compared  to Access (which
> itself isn't much to shout about). And OO Basic compared to VBA similarly.
> As an ex-programmer I'm always keen to automate any process, but the OO
> Basic learning curve turns many people off (as far as I can see from
> bulletin board comments - even this one) before they even start.
>
> Agreed that MS have problems in forwards compatibility. But that's an
> impossible dream. Can OO version 1 open OO version 3 documents?
>
> Unfortunately I'm too short of time to contribute to OO/LO development - I
> suspect there's another 2-year learning curve.
The whole office suite is about the ODF document standard. The database
connectivity is just a tiny extra. It lets you import arbitrary tabular data
into ODF documents for serial letters, labels and for calculation models.
Additionally you may attach very simple and very generic form controls (like
HTML forms) to ODF documents in order to write some data from your keyboard
or clipboard back into some editable database via ODBC or JDBC. 
That's all. No more, no less.

The "database application" called "Base" exists only as a
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village.
Nevertheless, this part of the office suite is extremely productive and
helpful as is.
In our small business we have almost no spreadsheet nor Writer document
which does not rely on some type of data source one way or the other. 
Writer's mail merge feature is far from perfect but if you have at least one
fairly computer literate person able to write very simple SQL queries, all
you need is the information: "Write your serial letter into template X and
connect the document with data source Y and query Z". The editor does not
need to care if data source Y is a database, a spreadsheet, a csv file or
something else. With a few clicks the new letter is connected to the right
table.
In addition I implemented a small inventory database which is not offered as
a component of our proprietary business software. Everybody is happy with it
even though it is not as pretty and streamlined as it could be. With a few
lines of very simple macro code my database outperforms any "Excel
solution", let alone paper records. The first version was almost as good
with zero lines of macro code. 

If you want to earn money with perfectly streamlined database solutions
based on the Base component you surely would have to overstretch the whole
thing. Even if you'd learn everything about that API it would not help much
because the thing behind the API is not ready for business and propably
never will be because that would take hundreds of thousands of code lines
far beyond the scope of the ODF document standard.

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