Do you Rekall?

[Andrew L. Gould]

On Wednesday 19 November 2003 10:39 am, Matthew Carpenter wrote:
> What is the key piece of MSOffice which is not readily available as Open
> Source?
>
> If you guessed "none" you'd be correct.  In a recent press release,
> theKompany (www.theKompany.com) has released Access-competitor "Rekall" to
> the OpenSource community, as a Dual-license GPL (retaining rights to market
> non-GPL versions to paying customers).  While Stallman would not approve, I
> believe you may find many developers and former-Windozers who do.  For more
> information, please visit http://www.rekallrevealed.org/
>
> Happy Linning.
>

I've tried this software.  Whereas it could be described as a query front-end; 
it should not be described as an "Access-competitor" -- it lacks both the 
features and stability.  (Yes, Access is more stable than Rekall.  No, MS 
Access is not incredibly stable.)

To say that a front-end for database administration or queries is a 
replacement for MS Access is to say that you haven't used all of the facets 
of MS Access:

1.  MS Access facilitates very complex analysis by treating select queries as 
tables; thus allowing for you to string many queries sequentially.

2.  MS Access has enough gui RAD tools to create front-end or stand-alone 
applications.

3  MS Access can be used as a stand-alone database.  This allows the user to 
download data for local processing.  This is important when there are network 
access issues or when the user does not have create table privileges in the 
network database.

4. Creating new ODBC links in MS Access is very easy.  In fact, you can join 
tables from different database servers -- Oracle and PostgreSQL, for example.  
I still use MS Access to gather and integrate data from separate sources 
prior to adding the data to my PostgreSQL databases.

I get the impression that developers of these "comparable" tools never speak 
with MS Access power users.

Andrew Gould