Thank you for those suggestions, Ryan. I have used SQLiteExpert as well as SQLiteStudio. I actually like the latter. It has some interesting features such as cell-by-cell rollback and commit, the ability to add new rows to the bottom of a table regardless of where your cursor is at currently, etc. But it seems to be a single-person development effort, so improvements are slow in coming. SQlite Expert has its own advantages including built-in viewers for images so that images stored as blobs in a SQLite db can be browsed instead of having to export them as files before looking at them. I have never tried SQLiteSpeed, and from its description, it seems to be very similar to the other two.
The strength of Access is not in having a good built-in front end, but in giving the user the ability to build a good custom front-end. Forms and reports with a visual basic based programming language (VBA) behind it to enable event-based computations, etc. The ability to arrange inputs and outputs using boxes that can be moved around on a page so that you get exactly the look and feel you are looking for instead of the straight (but endless) scrolling between rows and columns. The flexibility to make the forms and reports single-record or continuous. A multitude of charting options to visualize data rather than just looking at numbers. And the parent-child nesting of forms and subforms in Access is an elegant solution to the problem of updating the main table while simultaneously adding new entries to a related table to keep foreign keys in the main table in sync. Nothing like that exists in any of the front ends I have looked at for SQLite. And unfortunately, Access can't read SQLite files directly either. I don't blame SQLite for not having something like that. In fact, I know no other db product that comes with all this built-in. There are bolt-on products like crystal reports that will work with other db products to provide this kind of reporting capability, but that just increases the complexity of what all you have to pay for and keep up to date, and you can completely forget about platform independence. The only other way to handle what I used to do in Access is for me to learn PHP and use a web browser as the front end. That is now on my to-do list. In the meantime, sqlite studio and sqlite expert are passable. On the android side, there is a front end similar to sqlite expert called aSQLiteManager ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dk.andsen.asqlitemanager). But this also seems to be more of a 1-person development effort, so I am not sure how feature-rich it will eventually become. Balaji Ramanathan >I agree on the user-oriented front-end that MSSQL has, both in the SMS and the Access application, but you'll find there are quite a few >that makes life with SQLite a pleasure too - some of them very user oriented. May I suggest, if you use Windows as a vehicle, you try >either: >SLite Expert from: http://www.sqliteexpert.com/ >or SQLitespeed from: http://www.sqlc.rifin.co.za/ > >If between those you don't get most of the features you need (or you need it on other platforms or perhaps connectors), there are many >others that a simple Google will find. >Best of luck, >Ryan _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list sqlite-users@mailinglists.sqlite.org http://mailinglists.sqlite.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users
