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On 8/1/16 12:13 PM, Girvin Herr wrote:
On 07/31/2016 07:36 PM, Ken Springer wrote:
<snip>
I understand the concept of Front End/Back End, but never have dealt
with it.  Nor have I ever used MySQL, Mariadb, or others.  Access and
a bit of dBase is all I've ever used, and in general, even then that's
more power than I've ever needed.

Ken,
Actually, IIRC, Access has both a client and server built in.  The user
isn't normally aware of it.  In my experience with Access 1.1, the
server is called the "Jet" server.  Today's Access may no longer use the
Jet server, but I am sure something like it is still in there
somewhere.  I must admit the Access bundled concept is addictive.  As a
newbie to databases back in the 90s, I liked it and it was a shock and a
learning experience to wean myself off of it and go with the industry
standard forms of client/server architecture and the SQL language.

You've just mentioned the big "roadblock" for the average person to make use of databases. They are too complex to learn and use for most people. That's where the "all-in-one" solution is a better answer. It's a lot easier for the average user to wrap their heads around and then use it.

What happens? The average person fills up spreadsheet after spreadsheet of flat file data. My brother-in-law is a perfect example. Years ago, he was putting their music collection into a spreadsheet. When the sheet got to large for RAM and his computer crashed, he started splitting into multiple spreadsheets. But that made their goal of printing their entire collections of songs, alphabetized, impossible. I took the spreadsheets and combined them into Access 97, created an input form and reports, and everyone was happy.

Even getting people to use a flat file database like Database Oasis would be better than a spreadsheet.

Since then I have learned a lot and find the latter concept very
powerful.  In your case, if Access and dBase had/have more power than
you ever needed and that power is all that you will ever need, then the
LO internal HSQLDB engine is probably a good choice for your application.

It may be, if this was a single user issue. But we need to be compatible with MS Office without having enough Windows systems, where as I can lay my hands on 3 other Linux systems that are being unused.

Now that you mentioned dBase, you may, or may not, be aware that LO has
a dBase option.  But a limitation to it that I found is that older
versions of dBase files are not supported.  I have some old dBase 1.x
files with dbase programs that will not load into LO, let alone run.

I didn't know this, but must admit dBase is probably not the best answer.

Girvin





--
Ken
Mac OS X 10.8.5
Firefox 44.0
Thunderbird 38.0.1
"My brain is like lightning, a quick flash
     and it's gone!"


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