OpenOffice.org Base

Yesterday, I played a bit with the latest development build of the upcoming OpenOffice.org 2.0. A new part of OpenOffice.org 2.0 will be "OpenOffice.org Base", an MS-Access-like database application that comes with hsqldb as database backend, and also provides connectivity to all other variants of databases via JDBC.

Generally, OpenOffice.org Base is really good as a simple alternative to MS Access: you can create new simple db tables via a wizard or via manual editing, you can set relationships, you can create forms and queries that operate on the tables, and so on. One thing that I didn't like was that the table editing dialog wasn't very flexible: once you click "save", you cannot edit existing table fields anymore, you can only delete them and create new ones. I still have to get more into the form creation stuff, how flexible it really is and how difficult it is to create database applications that one used to create using MS Access (well, I never created any MS-Access-based applications). But what I know already is that OpenOffice.org Base is definitely easier to grasp than MS Access when you have basic knowledge about relational databases.