Cheaper altenative to access?? (1 Viewer)

[Mark-BES]

Just found this on the net

http://www.ability.com/sales/products/database.php?ln=uk

An alternative to expensive MS Office? Its about time.

Has ayone used it? Is it any good? Is Ability Database (£20) a viable alternative To Access.

I imagine old Bill is a little ticked off!

 

[neileg]

I remember using Ability in 1986. I hope it's matured in the last 20 years! I don't imagine Bill has ever lost any sleep over it.

 

[Bat17]

Open Office is free and has a databse, but I have not tried it out yet. A lot probably depends on how hard you are going to push the DB

Peter

 

[Pauldohert]

In the scheme of things the differance in price would not persuade me to use it.

Even if it were as good as Access (I have no idea ho good it is), the problems associated with its lack of marketshare would prevent me from using it except for the most simple, unimportant of solutions.

But thats just me!

 

[reclusivemonkey]

Open Office is free and has a databse, but I have not tried it out yet. A lot probably depends on how hard you are going to push the DB

I tried to have a bit of a play with the Linux version of this in Beta; I was going to try and attach it to my MythTV MySQL database, but the ODBC linking wasn't too happy. I don't really like scalc, Gnumeric is a much nice OSS solution IMHO for what I need at home.

From the blurb, Base has its own built in Database engine, but its based on XML, so I am not sure how well that would scale. However, combine it with MySQL, and you should have a pretty decent combination there for a very keen price ;-)

http://www.openoffice.org/product/base.html