On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 10:48:49PM -0400, Prof. John C Nash wrote: > One thing I don't know about is whether there is any open software > that can mimic MS Access. It may be that a few of us could do a MS Access is two things: it is a database, and an extendable gui/reportwriter. For the database, you can use sqlite or mysql (or for the brave, postgresql, it's not really that hard after all). For the extendable gui/reportwriter, I don't know of any open source alternatives - wish I did. However, I do know that MS Access is a bit lacking as a DB. It is probably closer to SQLite than MySQL (ie, it's a single-user database - it claims to be multi-user - with a max of 255 users though - and it tends to be buggy when you're trying to use it as multi-user). The GUI/reportwriter makes multi-table queries doable by non-DB people. bjb