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KDE Knoda Meets MS-Access in New Release

Posted by timothy on from the chipping-away dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Horst Knorr released a new test version of Knoda. With this release Knoda is the first KDE database frontend reading MS Access databases natively and is getting closer to its goal to be a full replacement for MS Access. Knoda is a database-frontend for KDE. Besides tables and queries Knoda comprises forms and reports, which are scriptable via Python."

9 of 57 comments (clear)

  1. Finally... by 0x461FAB0BD7D2 · · Score: 5, Funny

    I can mess around with Diebold's voting mechanism with open-source tools. I would have done it with Microsoft Access, but I have principles.

  2. good for small businesses by sfcat · · Score: 4, Interesting

    MSaccess is used to run alot of small businesses (who think that Access is somehow better than Excel). It would be nice to see if Knoda would also support more db like functionality (like transactions maybe) with autocommit turned on so that it seemed to work like access. Also, if you could make this have some transparent SQL layer so it could be a front-end to real databases (mySQL, etc.). But another barrier for some to migrate has been overcome. Good work.

    --
    "Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
    1. Re:good for small businesses by frission · · Score: 4, Informative

      somehow better than excel? you have not seen how feature rich Access is then. It's an excellent front end to Oracle and other databases (provided that you have the client installed). You can use QBE or write straght SQL and it'll actually work! Exporting reports to Word comes in especially handy, as do email merges, letter merges, etc.

      Good luck doing an update query in Excel...

    2. Re:good for small businesses by cyranoVR · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Good luck doing an update query in Excel...

      ...or constraining user input in Excel

      ...or quickly/easily finding duplicate entries (and I ain't just talkin' about the "Find Duplicates Wizard" as convenient as that is...)

      ...or quickly sorting a list in Excel without screwing the whole thing up (remember to select every column!)

      ...or having more than one person at a time edit an Excel spreadsheet (especially when "the meeting's in 20 minutes!!!")

      ...or having users that use cell colors and font formats to organize their Excel data (ummm...how do you sort blue, orange and yellow?)

      ...or (my personal favorite) getting those &$%@ing page breaks set exactly how you want them.

      When I am Supreme Chancellor, Excel will only be used for financial analysis. Those who mis-use it as a "database" will be whipped in the public square. No, I'm not bitter :\

  3. Access is evil by Q-bert][ · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's the single worse assault to databases in the history of the world. I think it's some kind of punishment for people who've committed a sin in some past life to get hired to work on access applications. It's just ungodly bad, perl has nothing against access for being able to write bad code. Ugh, and they are trying to replace it. Destroying it would be a better idea. Erase its existence from the universe.

    1. Re:Access is evil by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny
      So this "Access of Evil" the prez has ranted about all this time was just some database?

      Sheesh.

    2. Re:Access is evil by Monkelectric · · Score: 4, Insightful
      You my friend, are 100% correct. True story, I consult for a company who needed a fairly complex suite of applications written that essentially runs their entire business. I said, "this is a web application". They said, "we want it done in access." I needed the money bad, so I did it in access.

      Coding in access i pretty easy, except all the bugs. I literally spent more time working around bugs in Access then writing the application.

      The worst one was in a form which had a list of strings that needed to be refreshed based on the contents of another box. You call the requery method to refresh this, and you have to requery whenver the record changes -- which is an eventcalled "oncurrent". Well, somehow, requerying a specific textbox was causing the ENTIRE form to generate an "oncurrent". Which created a race condition -- the oncurrent event handler requeried which created another oncurrent event.

      I found a workaround after a LOT of suffering, but... Access is just unusable.

      --

      Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley

  4. Re:wow, shoot low why don't you by 0x461FAB0BD7D2 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Y'know, if you want to use an actual relational database with arbitrary constraints, updateable views, efficient joins, you can, you know, use PostgreSQL?

    Sure, it might not have everything Oracle has, but if it did, it'd just be Yet Another Oracle Clone, and we don't want that now do we, y'know?

  5. Rekall is not bad by auferstehung · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Rekall is not a bad database frontend with Access like style, but that can be used with a range of database backends (mysql, postgresql, etc). Like other Kompany products its is even dual licensed under the GPL. See RekallRevealed.Org

    --
    Logic is not Divine.