[plug] ZDNet Australia News & Tech OS SCO takes Linux to Murdoch Univers ity (fwd)

[Bret Busby]

On Thu, 10 Oct 2002, James Elliott wrote:

> 
> Maybe I was a bit quick and glib with my terms.  There are many "flat"
> databases out there, and that was what I meant to exclude.
> 
> Sure there are other relational databases, but if you were limited to a 13
> week course and wanted to teach something that Management had at least heard
> about and is readily available, I think Access and Oracle are two very good
> examples of different ends of the user scale.
> 
> Every network I have been involved in setting up and maintaining, mainly
> nickel mines and schools, have Access and also software like Surpac which
> you will find on every mine site, and which is based on Access ... so,
> despite the aversion to Windows, my training in Access has been very useful
> .... AND ... I don't think it is the sort of thing that would be easy to
> self-teach.  Some of the ones you listed might have been interesting to
> learn, but so far I have not come across them.
> 
> James Elliott
> 

Okay.

MS Access is convenient for training people in basic relational database 
principles, and in basic SQL, and Oracle is useful for teaching a bit 
further, as is done at Murdoch.

If you have learnt Oracle at Murdoch, it could be worth investigating 
PostgreSQL. There is, or was, an online book about PostgreSQL, which we 
downloaded and printed. Out of interest, PostgreSQL was the predecessor 
of Postgres, which (I believe) was the predecessor of Ingres (I may be 
wrong with the Ingres connection).

If you have time, sometime, it could be worth looking at, and having a 
play with, the ADABAS database that comes with Star Office 5.2, if you 
have (or get) a copy of Star Office 5.2. It could be useful for a single 
user, workstation solution. I am aware of it, but have not done anything 
much with it.

Both the pgaccess for PostgreSQL, and ADABAS, have a kind of MS ACCESS 
like interface (the GUI bit for setting up tables, etc)

Oh, and, MS Access is apparently useful for things other than being a 
backend database. Anne had one job, where she created an MS Access front 
end, for an Informix backend.

Foxpro was (from memory) a Borland product, then MS bought it from 
Borland, and incorporated Foxpro into Visual Studio 6. We had a look at 
it, for a conversion of a database that we had written, that needs 
rewriting, but, whilst Foxpro has a better backend than Access, it 
doesn't have what we wanted for a front end. I think the project would 
be better rewritten in Perl/PostgreSQL, but that is something that we 
have to decide.

Oh, and, out of interest, Access is not just limited to being a single 
user, workstation DBMS. From memory, Eve Voysey told me that she had an 
Access system servicing 200 users. It was a while ago when she told me 
about it, so I may be slightly wrong in that. But, Access has lousy 
locking.

-- 
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
..............

"So once you do know what the question actually is,
 you'll know what the answer means."
- Deep Thought,
  Chapter 28 of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
- Douglas Adams, 1988
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