[GRASSLIST:1099] Re: Looking for a guru...

[Paul Kelly]

Hello

On Wed, 3 Sep 2003, Bill Dickinson Jr wrote:

> Thanks for all the replies. ;-)  It sounds to me like I should have
> been on this list months ago when I first started running into
> problems instead of trying to - stubbornly - figure it out myself. ;-)

You can read and search the archives on the web:
http://op.gfz-potsdam.de/GRASS-List/
http://grass.itc.it/pipermail/grassuser/index.html
http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gis.grass.user
(there are several possible sources for this). Almost all the problems
have been discussed before. GRASS developers mailing list at
http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gis.grass.devel
http://grass.itc.it/pipermail/grass5/index.html
also contains much useful information

> I had not realized that GRASS does not need a database, so obviously
> my next step is to get GRASS running by itself and then potentially
> add the MySQL database support later on. Everything I had read gave
> the impression that you needed to have some form of database for
> GRASS to run properly, the recommended one being Postgresql. That's a
> little nugget of information that should be propogated better. ;-)

I tried to make two small changes to the web pages to make it clearer and
mention that external databases are only needed to support manipulation of
vector data with multiple attributes (I hope I got that right).
(See http://grass.itc.it/pipermail/weblist/2003-September/001223.html )
But everywhere I saw it clearly mentions that PostgreSQL / ODBC support is
optional.

I have been using GRASS for a year and a half without needing the database
access stuff at all. I am also using a platform (outdated IRIX system)
where installation of that kind of stuff is not easy. However GRASS 5.1
(to be 5.7.x) uses an internal dbf file driver by default so you don't
need a DBMS installed to do simple multiple attribute query work with it.

Paul Kelly