What is Reddit's opinion of Kexi?

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I've migrated off of them in enterprise environments -- more than most respondents, I'm confident. The work is one-time effort, and it can have benefits in performance, security, flexibility (browser interface, many tools), reliability and simplicity (not filesystem based), scalability and availability (replication) as well as cost. These are uniformly CRUD apps, and CRUD is well-understood and fairly simple.

In fact, as I sometimes point out, I migrated quite a few from their previous systems to Windows. Not much wailing and gnashing of teeth then, even though the migrations tended to be harder and have more regressions than would be acceptable today.

I've been involved with migrations off of Filemaker Pro, Access, and Foxpro. They're fundamentally Rapid Application Development environments for file-based databases, in the vein of previous popular solution dBASE. There's no magic there, except that it's somewhat common for them to have been built originally by people who know very little about databases or UIs, and that tends to show.

Although I haven't used it, a similar product for Linux is Kexi.

I've seen others, like Kexi, but don't know enough about any of them to even make confident suggestions. But it seems like a market segment that certainly hasn't been ignored.

There is no stronger Access. There are similar products like Kexi or Filemaker, but that kind of database is limited in scale and capability, usually not cost effective, and typically legacy. Access also historically has a reputation for corrupting its databases with multiuser access.

The place to move up is to a real, client-server SQL database. PostgreSQL is fantastic and runs on your choice of platforms, but there's also certain cases to be made for MariaDB/MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Firebird, even IBM DB2 and Oracle in some circumstances.

Access is a reliability accident waiting to happen when used on network shares. It's also far more expensive and legacy than full-blown open-source RDBMS like Postgres, MariaDB/MySQL, Firebird, or the gratis MS SQL Server Express. Various free front-ends are available or easily constructed.

The single most similar thing to Access, though, is Kexi.

Yeah, I'm aware of that, I didn't want to overwhelm the OP.

If all the OP wants is simply CRUD, using Django's admin functionality will mean they won't need much (or any?) SQL and very little HTML.

IMO this is a better choice than choosing something like Kexi, which might seem like a good idea at first but has its own set of flaws.

What does GUI mean to you? Three or more extremely powerful databases are open source and thus free of cost, and there is at least one more that's proprietary with a limited version available free of cost, but it's not clear what you need.

I would strongly avoid Access or Filemaker, as they are not free but are also not nearly as powerful as the free and open-source databases easily available and commonly used. If you think you need something like these two and won't use PostgreSQL, MariaDB, SQLite, Firebird, or MS SQL Server Express, then take a look at Kexi.

• [original post](/r/programming/comments/2vgf4/kexi_opensource_alternative_to_microsoft_access/)
• poster: [pbx](/u/pbx)
• sub: [/r/programming](/r/programming)
• score: 69
• comments: 14

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> Now, I could do this on SQL Server, but that seems so much like hunting squirrels with a machine gun that I'd rather just run it through Access.

But when one has taken the time to get expertise with SQL, you wouldn't use a different, weaker tool just because you felt bad using the full-power tool. Today we have several open-source RDBMS like PostgreSQL and even a limited version of SQL Server is available free, so not only is Access limited (and arguably unsafe for multiuser scenarios) it's more expensive than a real database.

Note that on the Linux/Unix side, a tool equivalent to Access or Filemaker Pro is Kexi.

don't know if any of these are useful for you as I haven't used them but they seem to have customisable data entry modes

kexi project http://www.kexi-project.org/ glom http://www.glom.org/wiki/index.php?title=Glom

but why not just use a spreadsheet with custom interactive form?