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No you aren't wrong. Used to be much worse before Base existed. Access is a very good product that is under appreciated. Though it has been going out of fashion now for almost two decades. The Linux community always had access to server class databases so the culture around desktop databases never developed.

One more OS alternative I'll throw out there you didn't mention: http://www.glom.org/

http://www.glom.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

Review from 2006...
http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2006/09/04/a-review-of-the-glom-graphical-database-front-end/

Those of us on Slashdot are unlikely to learn much of importance from the article, but if you skim it you might pick up a thing or two. I had never heard of Glom before, for example.

I did find it amusing that he showed a list of all his icons, including a Kubuntu icon, and then none of the KDE apps had the Kubuntu icon. I guess if you want to run KDE apps you should use Ubuntu instead of Kubuntu? :-/

I was also amused that he saw Lotus Symphony as a replacement for Microsoft Works. (IBM calls Symphony "Award-winning office productivity software".) Heh.

steveha

There is a number of access like applications for postgresql.

Checkout the postgresql website.
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/interfaces

Here are two postgresql form creators I have found useful in the past
http://www.glom.org/
http://www.treshna.com/bond/

Of course, if anybody knows a good data management program similar to MS Access that I can use to interface with a mysql server over an ssh tunnel, that would help us a lot.

Try this, although it was designed for PostgreSQL back-end (a better choice then MySQL long term anyway IMHO).

There are many more around, with different target audiences and design priorities. You just have to look around, find and try them.

Believe it or not, there's a small business who recently hired me to get them out of the mess that is FileMaker 5.0 -- if that, I think the majority of their machines run 4.0. I basically told them that to recreate their FileMaker database as anything relational (which they understand and want) will take about the same amount of time, whether I do FileMaker 8.0 or something else. Chances are, I'll take something like Glom or Rekall, maybe even Gnu Enterprise, create their database in that, and extend it.

I don't know if it'll do taxes, but it will do everything else. And I'll probably GPL all my work, too.

This is what Open Source is all about -- when you figure a system like this will probably cost you several thousand dollars anyway, why not pay a programmer to do it for you? It may end up cheaper, and it certainly means you can hire other contractors to mess with it later.

What you need, without the nonsense. With Glom you can design database systems - the database and the user interface. * Glom has high-level features such as relationships, lookups, related fields, related records, calculated fields, drop-down choices, searching, reports, users and groups. * Glom keeps things simple. It has Numeric, Text, Date, Time, Boolean, and Image field types. * Glom systems require almost no programming, but you may use Python for calculated fields or buttons. * Each Glom system can be translated for multiple languages and countries. Here are some screenshots with explanations, and news about recent changes. Concept The design is loosely based on FileMaker Pro, but with a separate database server. Its simple framework should be enough to implement most database applications. Without Glom these systems normally consist of lots of repetitive, unmaintainable code. Glom uses the PostgreSQL database backend but it can not edit databases that it did not create, because it uses only a simple subset of Postgres functionality. Open Source Glom is open source software, released under the GPL License.

It might be worth checking out Glom, it seems to provide an alternative to Base and looks, in general to be fairly elegant and easy to use. Still in development of course, and there are more nice features on the way, but it is definitely in the category of "projects to keep an eye on" as far as I am concerned.

Jedidiah.

With regard to something at least vaguely comparable to Access perhaps you should consider Glom which provides a nice simple easy to use front-end to a database (for now PostgreSQL, but MySQL support is expected to be forthcoming), and does all the nice things like report generated etc.

Jedidiah.

Glom? Maybe you can do something with that?

Like Glom or GNU enterprise. Both prefer to use postgres, but failing that, at least gnuenterprise can use sqllite for local database use (dunno about glom).
Both projects seem pretty good, they just need mindshare :)

http://www.glom.org/

"This query is called a left outer join because the table mentioned on the left of the join operator will have each of its rows in the output at least once, whe reas the table on the right will only have those rows output that match some row of the left table. When outputting a left-table row for which there is no right -table match, empty (null) values are substituted for the right-table columns.
Exercise: There are also right outer joins and full outer joins. Try to find out what those do."

when there really should be:

"TODO: There are also right outer joins and full outer joins. FIXME: We MUST write more."

Not to mention the "RTFS" answers in "TFM" for questions very frequently asked by beginners:

"4.3) How do I get a list of tables or other things I can see in psql?"
"You can read the source code for psql in file pgsql/src/bin/psql/describe.c."

Other than that I would say that PostgreSQL is definitely the way to go today. Once you get used to reading the source code as documentation (it is actually very clean and properly commented, so that's not such a big deal), you will really love it. And you will have the most important thing: ACID features. I hope it helps, I wish you the best luck.

See also:

1. http://www.postgresql.org/
2. http://www.mysql.com/
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySQL
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostgreSQL
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebird_(database_se rver)
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_database
7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_management_s ystem
8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACID
9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_model
10. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL
11. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_theory
12. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiomatic_set_theory
13. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicate_logic
14. http://www.glom.org/
15. http://www.servoy.com/
16. http://www.dotcomsolutionsinc.net/products/fmpro_m igrator/index.html
17. http://www.firebirdsql.org/

(Please forgive me if I repeat anything which has already been said. I started to write it as a first post but it took some time and I am sure that other

How about Glom?

It has a nice, clean GTK interface, and uses PostgreSQL for its backend.

Good luck!