free software alternative to Access

[Dan Coutu]

Peter Dobratz wrote:

> Does anyone know of any free software packages that we can use?  
> Basically, we have hikers and teams of hikers that raise money.  We 
> want to keep track of how much money each hiker contributed, and keep 
> their names and addresses, so that we can mail them a brochure for 
> next year's hike.  Most of the laptops that people own or borrow for 
> the event have some version of windows on them.  Some sort of bootable 
> CD with USB flash drives for the datastore might be optimal.
>
> --Peter

Well, it isn't a replacement for Access because it is a whole lot better 
:-) but I'd recommend using MySQL.

It runs well on Windows, if that's what you have to use, and has an ODBC 
component to provide easy interfacing to Office applications (assuming 
that's important to you.) It also has a GUI interface that you can 
download, for free, from the MySQL website and that GUI also runs on 
Windows (and Linux, of course.) You can even put the MySQL database on a 
Linux server and access it via ODBC from Windows if you like.

The main problem, of course, is that it doesn't break as often as Access 
or have the lame restrictions on scalability of Access. But you can 
probably manage to live with that...

Dan

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