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

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.

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