Most people forget Base in OpenOffice. I can understand, as Base is not even installed in most workstation installs of the Linux variety. When they do install Base and try to use it, they get shutdown by the enterprise database terminology used. In this article I clear up the confusion, and make you feel a little more comfortable with the Base portion of OpenOffice.
Base is almost an exact duplication of Access. Base can open any database for which it has an appropriate driver. The appropriate driver is any of the ODBC drivers or any of the JDBC drivers. That’s because underneath Base is the JDBC of Java. If you don’t want to connect to one of the Enterprise database, then if you have Java installed it will use something called Hsqldb. This is a database entirely written in Java. It’s amazingly stable. However it does have one failing, or it might be calle dstrength by some people, it describes data using SQL standard Databast data types.
With people interested in having things as easy as possible sometimes using Enterprise datatypes can be stifling. Just what exactly is a varchar and why is is it vexing me? Let’s start with starting Base and creating our first Table. At the first window of the wizard click on the radio button that says create a new database. Then click next. On this database leave the default selections alone. Click next you should get this screen:
If you choose use Wizard to create table, you will recieve a screen where you can pick and choose field from a variety of business and personal database tables. This gets rid of trying to figure out what data type goes with what. However you can still use design view to get the most detailed way of creating fields for your tables. This is the screenshot of the table designer in Base:
If the Base Table designer is familiar, they were influenced by Access, no doubt. They even have normal user style field names with database maven’s enterprise names. So, if you were looking for a replacement for Access, I can recommend OpenOffice’s Base product.
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