Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: Where is Base?

Hi :)
I don't see this thread as having been entirely negative at all!

Base is pretty fantastic despite having so few devs and being the most
unpopular module/program to work on out of the whole suite.  The devs who
are working on it are fantastic and heroic imo.

The only real problems are when people try to use Base in the way they
would use Access.  Access does quite a lot of very dodgy things that most
database programs steer well away from.  For a start having the front-end
and the back-end as 1 file is just asking for trouble for reasons which i
am not quite clear on but has been described in previous threads.  My pet
hate is that normal users are presented with the unfamiliar interface.  So
even if they just want to browse through records they kinda need training
and that training usually involves just how to design, create and build a
new database rather just how to flick through records.

Even with training it is all to easy for normal users to accidentally (or
otherwise) make a hideous mess of things.  The "contacts" database at my
work-place was such a hideous mess that even printing address labels was
practically impossible.  I didn't have time to go through all the hundreds
of badly named Queries to make any sense of them so i was never sure which
could be deleted and which were crucial.  So i had to make yet another new
one in order to avoid getting bogged down for days in a fairly simple
task.  When i got back to the database a week later someone had renamed my
Query and the Report so i had to do a bit of detective work to find them
again.  Nowadays no-one uses that database at all.  The company has lost
track of tons of contacts who may or may not have been useful.  Nowadays we
use a simple csv to track only the email addresses and we no longer do
mail-outs at all.


Base neatly avoid ALL that can be neatly avoided by using Writer or Calc to
create "Reports" or "Forms" so that people who are not into building and
designing databases are safely in familiar programs/modules.

So normal users can still do simple edits, such as correcting spellings or
changing the company letterhead and such-like but they do so in a familiar
environment without having to learn tons of stuff they will probably never
need.  They can even create new documents based on the existing ones.

At no point would they accidentally find themselves in "Desgn" views or
accidentally creating Queries.

So for me Base, Kexi and pretty much everything non-Microsoft has huge
time-saving advantages!
Regards from
Tom :)





On 3 March 2015 at 15:06, Peter Goggin <petergoggin@bigpond.com> wrote:

> Much of the e-mails on Base have focussed on negative aspects. It is worth
> remembering that for moderate size data bases (a few thousand records, a
> dozen tables) it is perfectly adequate.  I have now converted all of my
> data ase applications for MS Access to run on Base with its internal data
> base. All of them perform better than they did using MS Access. I would not
> regard either Base or Access as suitable for a large multiuser data base
> application.  The only linux based large data base I have developed I used
> MySQL with a web based front end using php to interface to the data base.
>
> Regards
>
>
> Peter Goggin

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