[plug] [CC of Letter to Editor] OpenOffice.org does do databases

[Leon Brooks]

[ re: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-techgear5aug05.story?null ]

Matthew Fordahl's AP story on OpenOffice.org that you copied has a copyright 
problem, and a technical inaccuracy.

The office suite is called OpenOffice.org, plain OpenOffice is owned by 
somebody else who might cut crook at your misrepresentation of their product. 
(-:

OpenOffice.org does indeed have a database interface. PostgreSQL 
(http://www.postgresql.org/) is an example of a free, Open Source database 
which also runs on Windows (and practically everything else too), and with 
which OpenOffice.org will do instant point-and-click robust data management.

Should you require it, PostgreSQL will scale up so that the toy demo database 
you threw together with OpenOffice.org can be transferred to a real Internet 
or Intranet host, even stretching as far as cluster-sized installations with 
features like replication. For free.

PostgreSQL is in a way a poster child for Open Source. I had it running on a 
baby gateway machine with only 12MB or RAM (yes, twelve, that's no typoe) and 
a 250MB hard disk until recently (now it's a P166 with 64MB and 6GB), and at 
the other end of the scale places like observatories use it for indexing and 
processing squillions of large, irreplaceable images. It sticks closely to 
the SQL standards, and was the first SQL-compliant database in the world to 
offer Object Oriented features. Unlike Oracle and SQL Server, it doesn't cost 
you an arm and a leg, doesn't lock you in to secret technologies, and doesn't 
require a monster server to deliver reliable performance.

OpenOffice.org does require significant resources, I wouldn't run it in 
anything less than 64MB of RAM. On the other hand, it can load and recover 
Word and Excel files that crash MS-Office, is better at many things like HTML 
tables, and it is immune to the common macro viruses. Definitely worth a 
look.

Cheers; Leon Brooks
Perth, Western Australia

-- 
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