At first sight this may seem to have nothing to do with Japanese animation, but read on…
The OpenOffice suite is an alternative to Microsoft Office, and has the advantage of being free. OpenOffice 2.1 now includes a database, Base, which can potentially be used instead of MS Access.
MS Access isn’t included in the entry level versions of MS Office because, to be frank, unlike Excel it’s a “developer” rather than a “user” program. The same applies to OO.org Base. I’ve tried to start a database development using Base and found that:
1) it does work.
2) It’s more clunky and awkward to use than Access and even when it can do things it can take some work to find out how. And I was not impressed by the Reports.
The interesting thing, however, about Base is that it was inconspicuously included in the early OpenOffice packages before OpenOffice had its own database engine. So how did that work??
To cut a long story short, Base can be used as a front end for any database engine, i.e. MS Access, MySQL, and lots of others, by linking to them as “data sources” with the aid of a suitable driver.
If you are running a MySql database on your local computer or network, you could download Open Office here,
read the instructions here,
install the JDBC connector/j driver downloaded from here
and (if you have also installed the Java Runtime Environment), fire up Base and link to your named database.
Once you have got this far, you can soon knock up a handy form that will let you inspect and add data to your MySql tables. And why is this useful to anime enthusiasts? You might have a MySql database on your website, and a mirror of it stored on your local computer.
A final, but important, tip. The import to Base isn’t perfect, and you may find that the form wizard won’t see some fields, e.g. your Blob text fields. Before you use the form wizard, look at your tables in Base, in the edit mode, and check that the field parameters make sense. e.g. change Image[Blob] to Memo[Mediumtext].
As of 2.2, OO still lacked any substantial ability to manage query update or insertion operations and it’s integration with MySql is by Java connector only, having at best limited DDT functionality and scary control of relationships.
Unless one’s inclined to learn the spastic waste of time of script management behind the scenes, making usable applications with base as a front end has a long ways to go yet.
On the other hand, there are good things in store yet to come from OO, sadly that they tend to release beta code into the production world, rather than working in good standards for regression testing. None the same, a lot has come from this development since Sun promoted it as open.