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I develop Access databases for a living (among other things...), but:

$ sudo apt-get install postgres pgaccess
$ pgaccess

Full GUI goodness for creating your postgres database.

$ pg_dump my_guified_db > m_g_d.sql

Email sql script (which contains all reports, tables views, etc...)

The next person needs to import ("open") the database, like this
$ psql my_other_db < m_g_d.sql
$ pgaccess

And the next person is up and running with their GUI goodness.

Yes, I used the command-line there, because it's the easiest way to show how simple it is. There are GUIs to do the import, export, and program install too, but I couldn't put screenshots in here.

FWIW: Access doesn't come with most versions of Office today. (I have to specifically inform my clients to get Office Professional, not Office Small Business Edition or Office Standard, and then to do a custom install to get Access on the machine...) But, just as with postgres/pgaccess, all that only has to be done once...

There are a few:

* Gnu Enterprise (never used it)
* Rekall (Python based)
* pgaccess (TCL/Tk based)

I think Access is great, for what it's intended for. It's perfect for small databases where someone would otherwise use flat files.

I completely agree. Access isn't a great database, but it makes up for that by the front end features that it provides for building small data-centric applications quickly and conveniently, with all of the forms and reports that you might want. Most other databases are essentially servers, and at best provide a command line access utility and an API so you can write programs to connect and get at the data.

I used Access for several years to store a relatively small membership database for an organisation I was helping out. (On the order of a few hundred members.) By it's nature the data integrity wasn't absolutely critical, but the relationships were complex enough that I really didn't want to munge it into a flat file. On the other hand it wasn't worth going to the effort of having a complete relational database server back-end and writing entire separate applications to access and format the data.

Access offers a nice miniature encapsulated package that lets you do things like this. You can store several tables and join them via SQL queries to get at your data. As importantly, you can also design the data entry forms and reports, package it all up inside a single database file and give it to someone else who can open and edit it directly as if it's any other document.

Since I've switched completely to Linux I've been looking for something that offers a similar accessible front end, but I haven't really found one. From what I understand StarOffice has something very similar to Access, but I haven't meen motivated enough to check that yet.

The only open source project I can find that does anything similar seems to be PgAccess, which is a Tcl/Tk front end for a postgres database. It's interesting, but still nowhere near as complete from a quick-and-dirty data-centric application interface perspective as MS Access.

There's a Tcl/Tk based WYSIWYG for PostgreSQL

Which is called pgAccess which on viewing the new screenshots is looking much slicker than it used to.

There's a Tcl/Tk based WYSIWYG for PostgreSQL

Which is called pgAccess which on viewing the new screenshots is looking much slicker than it used to.

There's a Tcl/Tk based WYSIWYG for PostgreSQL

Which is called pgAccess which on viewing the new screenshots is looking much slicker than it used to.

Anyone know how this compares to pgAcess?
If anyone is reviewing might make a good basis for comparison.

materialized views (which can increase performance)

point-in-time recovery

data partitioning

more flexible backup and restore options

the ability to use Win NT passwords and security (I know, that's not a big issue for most)
PostgreSQL does have some support from third-party software. phpPgAdmin for example, is a great tool and gets better with each release. pgAccess is a tool that comes with PostgreSQL, but I haven't used it much in the last year or so, and I remember it feeling like it was not quite ready for prime time. But it's a Windoze front-end for the PostgreSQL server and that's a big deal! There are also a couple of books about it (with more on the way, I hope), one of which, Practical PostgreSQL, published by O'Reilly is very good and available online.

The biggest thing you get for all the money you spend on Oracle is a "known" product. There are hundreds of books on Oracle (many are awful--caveat emptor) as well as classes and trainers and consultants and DBA's everywhere in the world (repeat caution above).

I love PostgreSQL, enjoy working with it, and am delighted with the new functionality the developers chose to include in version 7.3 (almost like they read my mind). Face it, for most medium-sized projects, we create a connection to the database (I often use ODBC) and start firing off queries. It doesn't matter to our program which database is behind the connection. We want speed, efficiency, and safety for our data. Anything more is window dressing (or comfort for the suits). Long live PostgreSQL!

Oops, I'm going to get down-modded for editorializing... *sigh*

Have you looked at PGAccess, it does form and report building for Postgress.