Trail of Tears: MySQL, ODBC, & OpenOffice 1.0

Joe Barr writes " I found a wonderful "how-to" piece called "OpenOffice.org 1.0, ODBC and MySQL," by John McCreesh. In the introduction, McCreesh writes about OpenOffice.org 1.0's "best kept secret" -- that secret being the fact that hidden away inside, completely unknown to most OpenOffice users, is a user-friendly front end for databases that is "a Microsoft Access (and more) equivalent." That may be so, but there is a very good reason why it's a secret: it's too damn hard getting OpenOffice and ODBC wired up correctly."

Comments

Not a 'secret'

[nurb432]

Its mentioned in the documentation, but agreed its a pain, and not fully documented, yet.

I think they are waiting until reporting is done to truely 'support' it..

Trail of Tears?

[mr100percent]

Hey, I wouldn't use "Trail of Tears" as the headline.

The Trail of Tears was the forced emigration of Native Americans from the South to Oaklahoma. It was brutal and painful, and something that Americans don't like to talk about.

"In one of the saddest episodes of our brief history, men, women, and children were taken from their land, herded into makeshift forts with minimal facilities and food, then forced to march a thousand miles(Some made part of the trip by boat in equally horrible conditions). Under the generally indifferent army commanders, human losses for the first groups of Cherokee removed were extremely high... About 4000 Cherokee died as a result of the removal. The route they traversed and the journey itself became known as "The Trail of Tears" or, as a direct translation from Cherokee, "The Trail Where They Cried" ("Nunna daul Tsuny"). "

Re:Trail of Tears?

[feed_me_cereal]

However, why does everyone have to be sensitive to everything that might offend anyone?

I don't know about all situations, but some assholes sailing over to your country and making you march to your death doesn't seem that comparable to the hassle of setting up open-office. So why is mentioning the significance of the trail of tears a bad thing? At worst, someone gets educated.

I find the political correctness thing is now as bad as censorship

How is it any different from correcting or offering a dissenting opinion? People are allowed to voice their opinion about things, even about what speech they find offensive. By your logic, critique is censorship just because people will be afraid of being critiqued and therefore not speak. That's BS. You're responsible for the things you say, whether you like it or not.

I'm sure one day some PC guy will come along and ask us not to use C because controllers written in C were used in some bomber aircrafts (or something like that)

Well then that PC guy is a moron and we can all laugh at him (allong with any cowards who actually bend to his will). It's a far cry from pointing out a comparison between installing OSS and mass-murder. Don't oversimplyfy political correctness. You're just as bad as the "PC freaks" you malign.

MySQL haiku: get it right

[Craig Shergold]

Install MySQL?
Better get support contract
Config files scattered

That's "my es cue el", my friend, not "my sequel". This first line has six syllables according to Monty...

Re:OLE DB??

[sandman_eh]

Yeah lets screw open standards.

Admittely ODBC is/was gennerally improved AFAICT by microsoft, it is essentially still an X/Open standard.

It is availble on many platforms, Mac/VMS/Unix/Windows and probably others too. It is a relative striaghtforward C API for database access. Ok, native access could be quicker but I think you'd find difficulty building a thinner layer for all databse engines.

Lets be honest about this two in many cases I reckon you will find OLE DB implement on top of the ODBC drivers . Not that I've ever used OLE DB being a crossplatform developer.

Re:Secret?

[Mr. Smoove]

It has been completed and is ready for inclusion in the next release of OOo (1.1) - the beta of which is due out towards the end of this month.

Re:Yes..

[PigleT]

You get an _isql_ with unixODBC, and an _odbctest_ with iODBC (see http://www.iodbc.org/ - there is choice amongst driver-managers, and iODBC even comes with a gtk config app looking relatively similar to Windoze' ODBC Administrator, if you like that sort of thing).

Re:Secret? ( Adabas )

[Locutus]

It's probably not unknown to those who've use the StarOffice v5.x database ( Adabas = SoftwareAG ). Granted, OO doesn't have the ODBC driver for that free Adabas database but if you've got the SO v5.x CDROM, you've got the driver.

It's working fine here.

BTW, it might not be well known that the database shipped with Sun's StarOffice 5.2( Adabas ) can be run as a multi-client database if you start the server on the right port. Here's a startup script:

x_server -p 7200
sleep 1
x_start dbaseName
sleep 2
xutil -d dbaseName -u control,user-passwd restart

StarOffice and OpenOffice just need to know where the file "./lib/odbclib.so" is. IIRC

LoB

Author is an idiot

[sholden]

Yes if you are going to compile stuff yourself you need to be prepared to make sure you actually configure things correctly. So that various software parts agree on where things are located.

If you just want to use the damn software on the other hand you simply do:

$ su root
# apt-get install unixodbc libmyodbc openoffice.org unixodbc-bin
# cp /usr/share/libmyodbc/odbcinst.ini /etc/.
# exit
$ ODBCConfig
- use GUI to configure database info
- note you could skip that 'cp' command and
- config the whole thing here, but that seems
- like extra effort to me when a perfectly good
- MySQL config exists already :)
$ oowriter
- Tools->Data Sources
- New Data Source
- pick ODBC and the name you set up above
- Do your database stuff...

Not exactly rocket science.

The article author is simply an idiot, who wants to make life difficult by compiling software himself without bothering to configure it properly.

Re:Something open source?

[dJCL]

I scraped the article of newsforge earlier today, and out of sheer curiosity I tried to get it working. I'm running debian, had OO installed already and am using mysql for some other work here already...

I just read his article for some hints, and installed the unixODBC and the mysql driver using the package manager(could have used the command line, I just like the interface) and modified one file to point it at a table...(there is a gui for this too) and it worked in OO.

Debian straight up is not always for beginers, I know what I am doing(at least on mondays) and even then I didn't have to think about it much(other than messing with my passwords elsewhere). I've used some deb derivatives, they could make something like this setup a joke to do.

This is a good tool to have, I won't use it because I like to command line, but it will make things easier soon. OO is well writen enough that it just deals with ODBC, and ODBC is very close to the simplicity of setup. So we soon will not have the problem that the article described.

Enjoy.

Another better article on this

[MrBrklyn]

NYLXS did an article on this in the September Journal and will be following up with a series on Open Office.

http://www.nylxs.com/journal/sept2002/openoff_my sq l.html

http://www.nylxs.com/journal/

Read the article, your two points are missing big

[BoomerSooner]

He was refering to his "friend Milt" who was the Windows/DOS/Network guy. This is the person I said shouldn't be trying to install it on Linux. Now if he would have tried on Windows that would have made sense.

The columnist is a linux user and as such figured out the problem and posted the solution. Now how much of a user he is can be debated.

You dont have to be "leet" as you put it to install the equivilent in Linux but it helps to have actually been a user of linux beyond "I installed Suse today".

So if the writer and Milt are the same person I guess you're right. Otherwise reread the article, again.

Re:Secret?

[chriskenrick]

Is there a PostgreSQL driver for it?

Actually, yes. I managed to talk ODBC from a PHP script running under Apache to a PostgreSQL backend. This was under Redhat 7.3, just using the provided RPMs. Look into the unixODBC and postgresql-odbc packages. Getting the config files set up properly was the biggest thing, but after that it was a piece of cake.

Pedants' corner

[alext]

You aren't, or you weren't - AFAIR the RDB project at IBM - System R*? - originally called the language SEQUEL (hence Ingres QUEL, which might be the commercial product someone else remembers).

However the IBM TLA police were called in (they turned a number of products into TLAs for some reason) and officially renamed it S.Q.L., so it's an SQL database these days.