[Gllug] MS Access to Star office/open office

[Bernard Peek]

In message <20031103103143.GE22124 at mint.phcomp.co.uk>, Alain Williams 
<addw at phcomp.co.uk> writes

>On Mon, Nov 03, 2003 at 10:22:17AM +0000, kumara g wrote:
>> Hi All,
>>
>> I wonder whether anyone of you have tried to migrate
>> from MS Access database to open office or Star office.
>> I have an importnat customer database in access with
>> GUI which i want to migrate to open office or star
>> office if possible, but i am not sure .
>>
>> Also i need to give multiple access to the MS access
>> database to linux clients running a java application.I
>> have written the java application which can access the
>> MS access when the application sits on the same
>> windows box,but not sure about accessing from the
>> linux boxes.Does anyone have any idea ?
>
>There are 2 issues:
>
>1) The data. It is easy to extract this into another database (mysql/....)
>   There are lots of tools to do this, browse the mysql web site.

You can use ODBC to attach MySQL tables to an Access database. You can 
then use the Access front-end to send data to the MySQL database. This 
is probably the simplest way of making the Access data available to a 
web-server.

If you intend to replace the Access front-end then you probably need a 
more powerful database system so PostgreSQL is probably a better choice 
then MySQL.

>2) The access forms/reports. There is nothing to automatically 
>extract/translate
>   these into something else. There are several projects which aim at this
>   but none seem to be getting close to delivery (or moving very fast).

The Knoda project aims to clone all of the functions of MS Access but it 
hasn't reached the point where it could be used for live systems.

As far as I know there is no free replacement for MS Access. There are 
commercial database development systems but they are all expensive. The 
simplest solution may be to run MS Access under Crossover Office or 
VMWare.




-- 
Bernard Peek
London, UK. DBA, Manager, Trainer & Author. Will work for money.


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