One thing that people keep asking me is when Microsoft is going to add Access to the Mac. I eally don’t think that will happen. Microsoft is committed to their operating system, and I rather doubt that they will want to port something as vital to their interests as Access over to the Mac. Apple has seen this and that is why they added CoreData to their operating system services.
CoreData is data persistence and querying built into the operating system itself. In order to take advantge of this system you will have to know objective c and the xcode development system. This is not Access though. Acces is databses for the rest of us. I started to look around for an Access-like database system. I thought Bento might be it, but Bento is really for organizing information on a more simplistic system. Yojimbo really does not have the ability to make form based data like Bento. So what is the answer?
The answer comes from an unlikely source; OpenOffice, or NeoOffice. Right now OpenOffice is in 3.0 Beta, but the cool thing about that is that 3.0 has been rendered into a Universal app for Macs. What that means is that we have access to hsqldb databases created in the Base portion of the application. Now we had this since version 2.0 NeoOffice. I am not putting down the efforts of the NeoOffice group, but a Mac Native app from OpenOffice is more interesting to me.
OpenOffice uses hsqldb, a database written entirely in Java which is platform independent as long as we have the Java runtime in our system. In fact if you create a database in OpenOffice on the Mac, that database is completely portable to any system that has OpenOffice installed on it (and Java of course.) Reporting is quite capable in OpenOffice (It uses the Wrtie component to build it’s reports.) Base is also capable of linking to any system for which is has ODBC drivers or JDBC Drivers. I’d like it to use JavaDB, but that requires 6.0 support in Mac OSX.
Right now if you want to make databases with a solid product, I would recommend you use NeoOffice until OpenOffice 3.0 is nearer to production quality. I know that few people have been screaming at me for me to mention FileMaker pro, et. al. The poblem with FileMaker pro is the cost. If all you want is Access-like functionality OpenOffice’s Base is probably the best bet for the price, free.
