Use LibreOffice Base as a GUI for an SQLite Database in OS X (2016)
andrewheiss.com
andrewheiss.com
I have built many MS Access applications and they always were surprisingly resilient. I believe even to this day there is a MS Access database GUI application running somewhere I built 15 years ago. Standalone, not connected to the web or anything. Just plowing away, just a single self contained file (mind the Office dlls etc.), backup and recovery is as easy as copying the complete file over to anywhere else and you're good.
I think I have tried every alternative out there, but none hit that sweetspot (they always lack something).
Cloud based can be very convoluted as a solution as it has to solve all the corner cases. And then you have to worry if the cloud provider will drop your data or let you export it easily for backup -- which they may or may not let you do easily.
It worked pretty well! I believe it was home grown, but eventually expertise in it left and they were looking to move onto something else, which IMO was probably a mistake - it may have been easier to just fix the bugs and not try a difficult migration.
I really want LibreOffice Base to be usable as an Access replacement, but it seems that it’s simply there to tick off the box “database tool for the office suite”. So it implements the necessary features that this box would require, but the corners haven’t been rounded off.
I’m sure people must be using it to various extents, but it definitely lacks the basic accessibility to its features that Access provides.
I sort of posted the link to also check how other HNers may use it, and it seems that your experience matches mine: I’d love for it to be easier to use.
The advantages: You get a web interface for free (using CGI) if you want one, it's distributed and version controls your database automatically. You can view reports graphically, at the command line, or from any other app that read an SQLite database. And in terms of stability, since Fossil is developed by the SQLite project, you can be confident that it'll be maintained for the rest of your life.
Other than Access, that seemed to change overnight, and now it barely is a thing you can do with your computer at all, and even Access is aimed exclusively at enterprise usage.
I wonder why. I often think that a desktop GUI database app would be very useful, but with the possible exception of the aforementioned LibreOffice Base, this barely exists at all.
The idea of data that lives on one local machine is so completely alien to the modern view of software(At least to me) that I'd have to actively spend time looking for use cases.
A database that was as easy to use as SyncThing would be revolutionary though. So many spreadsheets could be replaced.
Which has been around 2yrs and hasn't been fixed yet. The work around of un-signing didn't work either.
So as cool as this is, it doesn't seem to be very usable, which might be why nobody bothers to document it.
Funny how useful MS Access is after all these years, despite a few competing options over the years, with none really taking hold and no really good open-source alternatives.
I tracked it for a long time, just was never able to make it fit my needs
Not a webapp. Something you can run inside a git checkout, and get an essentially equivalent UX in any terminal. I'd expected that Python would be rife with such projects, but it seems that "Just build a webapp with my favorite toolkit" is a solution that satisfies most of the itches.
Disclaimer: am author.