[kwlug-disc] Personal Database Software

[Paul Nijjar]

I felt a similar frustration and went through a bit of a dive, but
ultimately gave up.

The proprietary successor to Microsoft Access appears to be Airtable.
In that light I started looking at NocoDB, but got frustrated because
I could not make it work with the database schema I had in mind (I
don't remember the details now, but I think I was trying to model many
to many relationships). 

One big issue is that if you are going to have such a product that is
accessible over multiple devices you are probably looking at hosting
something somewhere. If you are technically inclined enough to do that
it is not much of a leap to jump to a framework like Django, which can
get you a simple (if ugly) CRUD application quickly. In contrast, if
you are not inclined to set up web hosting then somebody else has a
SaaS solution for you. 

In some sense SQLpage is almost what you want, except that it is ALL
SQL, not no SQL. But it seems very quick to prototype databases using
this tool.

(Also Microsoft Access is an abomination and always has been. It
pretended to be user friendly and emphatically was not. As far as I
could tell it was bad at everything except being inexplicably
popular.)

- Paul


On Sun, May 12, 2024 at 12:37:43AM -0400, Chris Irwin via kwlug-disc wrote:
> I've come across the need for software that I think used to be common, but
> seems to have stagnated (i.e., not survived the jump to multi-device or
> multi-users): Personal Database Software.
> 
> Baseically like Microsoft Access, or LibreOffice Base: Define a Table (i.e.
> "Albums"), define fields/layout a form ("Title", "Artist", etc), and then
> you can start adding entries, searching, browsing, etc. Easy enough for a
> user without having to know SQL, or any scripting languages.
> 
> If it was just me, I could theoretically just use LibreOffice Base (or
> postgres directly, I guess).  However, that doesn't really work well in
> either the multi-device world (look things up from my phone while away from
> home), or multi-user world (share tables with other people)
> 
> It goes without saying that there's a *strong* preference for self-hosted
> open source solutions.
> 
> I figured there'd be some niche project that I just haven't come across, but
> I'm really not finding anything.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Chris Irwin
> 
> email:   chris at chrisirwin.ca
>  xmpp:   chris at chrisirwin.ca
>   web: https://chrisirwin.ca
> 
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