Re: DATABASE on RH

[John Lewis <jayell mcmail com>]

> > Have you looked at StarOffice. It has a M$Access clone as part of the package. I
> 
> On Thu, Dec 31, 1998 at 06:52:18PM -0500, Steven E. Frazier really opened up and said:

> : Does that mean that you could have a .mdb file sitting on a linux box say
> : under samba and
> : NT/95 boxes running Access could access the file?
> : Can it also be accessed from a web server running on linux?
 
Fred responded:

> You can certainly have an .mdb sitting on a Samba share. This is
> nothing more than simple file sharing. The same works with FoxPro
> .dbf's, too.
> 
> One thing I noticed was that queries against a largish .dbf on a share didn't
> work so well. The problem may have been hardware; the box had an old
> NIC and just 16MB of RAM and was something of a junker. It merited
> further research but the box was confiscated for other purposes.

Thanks Fred for this as I know nothing about Samba and my networking at home
consists of using a floppy disk to transfer files between machines

David E. Fox then said:
 
> Well I have and even have used :) SO 5.0 here and although the database
> is more or less there, it doesn't seem to be much more than a simple
> flat-file addressbook model. Access, on the other hand, is relatively
> powerful, though not in the same class as Oracle, Informix, etc.
> 
The flat file model does fill my simple needs, club membership records with
monthly mailing of the club magazine done with aid Avery labels. The label
wizard set this up with no bother - some things are not too bad in M$ products.

[OT]
I do have a more complex project lurking though, it involves entering
competitors names into a database, sorting by race category and allocating race
numbers according to category. Prior to each race we need to seed riders based
on previous race history to get an initial start order. Having done that on race
day we need to be able to automatically log race times to each rider and then
sort results and reallocate start
order for the second run. Finally we need to be able to get an instant printout
of the results. 

We have the timing equipment, accurate to 1/1000 sec, and can get the interface
to the PC from the people who supplied the timer. In case anyone is still
following this it is to do with mountain bike downhill racing. in the Uk courses
are very short and the winning time for our last race was under two minutes. We
would like to be able to start riders at half minute intervals so need to
automate the data entry part. We entered results manually but needed more than
1/2 min intervals. This was OK with the small field we had for our first race
but we are aiming at 300 riders each day for our 1999 race series. (300 x 1
minute x 2 runs + practice runs = a very long day)   
[/OT]

> Although PostgreSQL and the other offerings are valuable and
> powerful, it's rather difficult on the typing fingers to type in
> things like 'insert into phonebook values ('......') everytime you
> want to add a new record (most of the query tools I've seen don't
> even have readline capability built in, either). And to have to
> write software to get a desired interface is beyond many people.
> 
Sure wouldn't work for my problem. It takes long enough to enter race number
plus elapsed time into the spreadsheet we used last time without all the other
stuff.

> Although databasing with Web forms and so forth seems to be the
> way things are progressing, it would be nice to just have a
> simplified (although still able to have a powerful enough
> backend) method for designing, data entry & retrieval of
> the data. Paradox and/or Q&A come to mind in the DOS
> arena, and I haven't seen anything close as of yet.
 
Fred later said:

> One other option that I know about, though it certainly won't be an
> option for everyone.
> 
> Apparently there isn't much available in the way of a database that
> uses flat files, the way that XBase programs did/do. It seems most of
> the databases are really SQL servers. On the very low end there are
> DBM files, but I guess they can't really fill the middle ground.
> 
> A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, M$ made a version of FoxPro
> for Unix. This is still available, and the reports I've heard indicate

<big snip>
 
> This option would give you the ability to access flat files with
> millions of records with FoxPro speed. There is that 2GB file size
> limit, but for many small applications this is more than enough.
> 
> The catch: they're selling it for no less than $750, the last I
> checked (a couple months ago). You can find it at CDW, among other
> places.
> 
> Don't ask me what makes anyone think that *any* M$ software is worth
> $750.00. I sure don't know.

$75 and I'd give it a try, if it has a graphical interface to set up forms,
reports etc, but $750 is over the top these days.