7 ms·

I wonder how much effort it would take to build a desktop application providing a similar user experience to Access, using SQLite.

krilly 7y ago
Open/LibreOffice Base does have backends for MySQL and PostgreSQL already
- yyx 7y ago
  I wish it was this easy to connect sqlite
- projektfu 7y ago
  I tried open office base about 10 years ago and it was almost but not quite impossible to use. Has it improved?
_AzMoo 7y ago
Why would you do that though? The underlying database technology is not really one of the problems access has.
- allannienhuis 7y ago
  cross-platform might be one reason.
- onefuncman 7y ago
  Sure it is ... the database underlying Access uses JetSQL which has its own fun syntactic quirks It's also very bad at concurrent users if you do go down the path of dropping it on a network share if it's a normalized schema, since there's no server to cache queries or do optimizations... for strictly data entry against a simple schema you can maybe push it to low 100s of users, but backing up / restoring / rolling out new versions is a nightmare when the frontend and backend are commingled like that. You can deploy different versions of .mdbs if you have an external backend, though I've never seen anyone do so with an Access database backing an Access "UI" project...
dev_dull 7y ago
I tried doing this once with Go, hoping for a static binary, but SQLite library requires glibc. There’s a huge need for a sql-compatible sqite-like database for this purpose in Go.
- colonwqbang 7y ago
  So, link in glibc statically? I may be wrong, but sqlite is used a lot on Android which uses bionic, not glibc right? So it seems like there should be hope of switching to another libc if you need.
  - dev_dull 7y ago
    With sqlite3 package and Go this doesn’t look possible, or at least not easy. https://github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3/issues/212#issuecomment-112824993 https://github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3/issues/212#issuecomment-...
ako 7y ago
Maybe you can use Access as the front end to SQLite? During my internship 25 years ago I build a system to register aircraft accidents and near accidents. This system used access 1.0 (Windows 3.1) as the front end, storing the data in Oracle 6, I think connected through Odbc.
- lstamour 7y ago
  Yup, ODBC still works: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/administer-odbc-data-sources-b19f856b-5b9b-48c9-8b93-07484bfab5a7 https://support.office.com/en-us/article/administer-odbc-dat... though because this is Microsoft and we can’t have nice things, it might not: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/access/cannot-use-odbc-or-oledb https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/access/... For SQLite there’s https://github.com/softace/sqliteodbc https://github.com/softace/sqliteodbc but at that point I might pick a different DB for a more established ODBC driver. Or just use Access...
  - Bombthecat 7y ago
    But this requires admin access to install? No?
    - lawzup 7y ago
      yes it requires admin access
cutler 7y ago
The hard part is the [nested] forms. Access and FileMaker have polished interfaces which would take a lot of man-hours to recreate. Maybe Electron or an SPA built in React.

krilly 7y ago

Open/LibreOffice Base does have backends for MySQL and PostgreSQL already

yyx 7y ago
I wish it was this easy to connect sqlite
projektfu 7y ago
I tried open office base about 10 years ago and it was almost but not quite impossible to use. Has it improved?

_AzMoo 7y ago

Why would you do that though? The underlying database technology is not really one of the problems access has.

allannienhuis 7y ago
cross-platform might be one reason.
onefuncman 7y ago
Sure it is ... the database underlying Access uses JetSQL which has its own fun syntactic quirks It's also very bad at concurrent users if you do go down the path of dropping it on a network share if it's a normalized schema, since there's no server to cache queries or do optimizations... for strictly data entry against a simple schema you can maybe push it to low 100s of users, but backing up / restoring / rolling out new versions is a nightmare when the frontend and backend are commingled like that. You can deploy different versions of .mdbs if you have an external backend, though I've never seen anyone do so with an Access database backing an Access "UI" project...

dev_dull 7y ago

I tried doing this once with Go, hoping for a static binary, but SQLite library requires glibc. There’s a huge need for a sql-compatible sqite-like database for this purpose in Go.

colonwqbang 7y ago
So, link in glibc statically? I may be wrong, but sqlite is used a lot on Android which uses bionic, not glibc right? So it seems like there should be hope of switching to another libc if you need.
- dev_dull 7y ago
  With sqlite3 package and Go this doesn’t look possible, or at least not easy. https://github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3/issues/212#issuecomment-112824993 https://github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3/issues/212#issuecomment-...

ako 7y ago

Maybe you can use Access as the front end to SQLite? During my internship 25 years ago I build a system to register aircraft accidents and near accidents. This system used access 1.0 (Windows 3.1) as the front end, storing the data in Oracle 6, I think connected through Odbc.

lstamour 7y ago
Yup, ODBC still works: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/administer-odbc-data-sources-b19f856b-5b9b-48c9-8b93-07484bfab5a7 https://support.office.com/en-us/article/administer-odbc-dat... though because this is Microsoft and we can’t have nice things, it might not: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/access/cannot-use-odbc-or-oledb https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/access/... For SQLite there’s https://github.com/softace/sqliteodbc https://github.com/softace/sqliteodbc but at that point I might pick a different DB for a more established ODBC driver. Or just use Access...
- Bombthecat 7y ago
  But this requires admin access to install? No?
  - lawzup 7y ago
    yes it requires admin access

cutler 7y ago

The hard part is the [nested] forms. Access and FileMaker have polished interfaces which would take a lot of man-hours to recreate. Maybe Electron or an SPA built in React.