Re: Becoming part of Gnome Office

[Brian Bruns <camber ais org>]

On 30 Dec 2002, Rodrigo Moya wrote:

[snip]

> On Mon, 2002-12-30 at 19:18, Martin Sevior wrote:
> > Could libgda be extended to to include gmdb as a data source? That way all 
> > the other gnome-office applications would have access to *.mbd files. This 
> > could significantly enhance the ability of Gnome-office to inter-operate 
> > with MS Office particularly in Business settings which make extensive use 
> > of MS Access. I see this as a significant advance where everyone wins.
> > 
> > gmdb gains more users, libgda gains more users, AbiWord and Gnumeric gain 
> > more users.
> > 
> yes, that's the plan, there is a libgda provider that uses libmdb to
> access MS access files. So far, it is able to read the tables in the
> database and little more, but I'm working on it. Apart from that, the
> big thing missing is the write support, which is in the TODO list for
> libmdb.

Actually, I'm working on 'update in place' writes as we speak, which are 
the easiest cause we don't touch allocation or indexes for those, and it 
gives us a base to build from, so it's coming. Anyway, my time is limited 
and these are the areas I'm trying to work on.  

> That is, all libgda apps will have access to MS Access files via the
> libgda provider that uses libmdb (part of mdb-tools). That's why I was
> talking about gnome-db being a competitor for gmdb, since it will also
> support access to MS Access files.

But where my point comes in, is that Access is a bit different from say, 
mysql or postgres or the big databases, in that it is a development tool 
and runtime as well as a simple database and these are the things that 
gmdb (I guess I need a more catchy sounding name eh?) will be geared 
towards.  So Gnome-DB (correct me if I'm wrong) will probably never handle 
something so specific to one database and out of the realm of traditional 
databases.

I imagine the SQL window and couple other functions will be subsumed by 
the libgda provider, but then we'll also have recovery tools for corrupt 
databases and some other really neat things bundled in.

> cheers

Cheers,

Brian