[GRASS5] Start planning for GRASS 6.2?

[Michael Barton]

Markus,

Actually, I was thinking of file compatibility with OO (a database driver)
rather than an interface here. IMHO, we still need an attribute management
interface in GRASS itself.

In OO, if you use the database module ("base") it works much like Access and
handles very large sets of records. A spreadsheet is not really for database
work, though I realize that many people with small files use it that way.

OO 1.x used dbf files for its default database format. In OO 2.x, they've
moved to a new system, HSQLDB. The new one can be had as a stand alone dbms
<http://hsqldb.org/>. As we are talking about implementing more robust
database implementations for GRASS, I wanted to raise the mention of HSQLDB.

Michael
__________________________________________
Michael Barton, Professor of Anthropology
School of Human Evolution and Social Change
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ 85287-2402

phone: 480-965-6213
fax: 480-965-7671
www: http://www.public.asu.edu/~cmbarton



> From: Markus Neteler <neteler at itc.it>
> Date: Thu, 27 Oct 2005 13:57:12 +0200
> To: Michael Tiemann <tiemann at redhat.com>
> Cc: Michael Barton <michael.barton at asu.edu>, grass5 <grass5 at grass.itc.it>
> Subject: Re: [GRASS5] Start planning for GRASS 6.2?
> 
> On Thu, Oct 27, 2005 at 07:34:10AM -0400, Michael Tiemann wrote:
>> On Wed, 2005-10-26 at 22:53 -0700, Michael Barton wrote:
> ...
>>> The other is a better attribute database management system (some kind
>>> of a spreadsheet like form for data tables, with some basic editing,
>>> selecting, and maybe even querying).
>> 
>> I /love/ this idea.  I think it would be one of the most powerful things
>> we could offer.
>> 
>>>  There was some discussion a short while back about adapting an
>>> existing set of tools for this, tied to implementing SQLite (I can¹t
>>> remember who at the moment). More recently, the possibility has been
>>> raised about making SQLite the default attribute data management
>>> system‹although having briefly looked at the new system used by Open
>>> Office 2, I wonder if we might want to think about heading in that
>>> direction (or does the Java platform make it difficult?). Is this a
>>> possibility in the near future?
>> 
>> I think we should look hard at solutions that integrate directly with
>> OpenOffice.org.  OOo Calc is not my favorite spreadsheet, but it's a
>> very popular one, and to be able to integrate GRASS into OOo would be to
>> immediately reach thousands of potential users who want to plot
>> demographic (and other) data against things like US states or countries
>> or counties, etc.
> 
> While I agree to have a nice GUI for attribute database management,
> there is still the 65xxx limit in OpenOffice2. In GIS we easily hit
> such limits...
> Is there an alternative?
> 
> Markus
>