HERRICK BROWN & Company Ltd.
You very probably have heard of Microsoft's Access (part of Office) and SQL Server, a good combination for producing database applications.
BUT : Have you looked at -
Sun's StarOffice. StarOffice and OpenOffice run on both Windows and Linux. The StarOffice Base database module connects to ODBC databases and integrates effectively with Microsoft SQL Server and other sources of data tables. For example:
IBM's DB2 and MySQL, which both work well on both Windows and Linux.
Both OpenOffice and MySQL run on both Windows and Fedora Linux, and can interoperate between the versions, including synchronising the MySQL databases.
Other popular database packages include :
Advantage Ingres ; Borland's Interbase ; Oracle ; PostgreSQL ; Adabas ; Pervasive ; and Sybase.
And if you are not locked in to Windows, look at Fedora.
If you are interested in implementing a business application involving storing records about things and or people and transactions, there will probably be a number of "off the shelf" software packages from which you can choose. If you are not starting from a "clean sheet", your choice will be limited by your existing software; but with ODBC and other standards, it is amazing what can be achieved.
We have moved data from a number of different applications to more appropriate ones. One example was moving approximately 15,000 records from Act!, along with their History, Notes and Group records, to SQL Server tables so that the Act! data could be used with another application.
Integrating databases with intranets and the Internet is usually not a technical problem.
All trademarks etc. acknowledged.
Last edited 22 August 2007