Shelagh Manton wrote:
On Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:03:06 +0100
Nino Novak <[email protected]> wrote:
On Tuesday 27 October 2009 02:40, Elder Dan Lewis wrote:
Nino Novak wrote:
On Monday 26 October 2009 15:35, Elder Dan Lewis wrote:
How big is the database in this tutorial?
very small (it's an appointment scheduler)
Perhaps it might be a
great help if it is large enough. Does it require the use of SQL in
creating some of its queries?
The goals of the document are primarily to learn and understand the
principles and usage of a data base "by doing" (what are
tables/forms/queries...? How do I create and use them efficiently?)
SQL use is not described as the document is a starter and
concentrates on the basics of OOo Base.
One of the things that has bothered me is that many of the
guides for OOo are written in English and then translated into the
other languages. I personally believe that there are many people
using a variety of languages which could be writing parts of these
guides, and these could then be translated into the other languages
including English. Unless someone knows what the original English
document from which it was translated, it would be nice if one of
your team members would translate it into English to be placed in
the tutorial section of the English Documentation. Just a thought.
We are not a real "team", we are a volunteer community ;-)
What I want to do in the Base Guide is to describe the process
of going from a general idea of the data someone has and what he
wants to do with the data to the finished database. Zoltan from
Hungury has suggested a business application database, and I really
like this idea. I want it to be a fairly large and complex database
to demonstrate how to create such a database using Base.
Well: try it :-)
My personal opinion is that for beginners you should start as simple
as possible. The mentioned tutorial uses a very simple data
structure. You can add complexity later, when the basics are
understood.
Unless the
document to which you referred does this, I know of no documentation
on Base which does this.
Dies ist meine zwei pfennig. :-)
Your comments are not discouraging to me at all. I don't want
to "reinvent the wheel", but I do want to redesign it so that it
will do more things. And I too would like to see an English
translation of the document you mentioned. It may well serve a very
useful purpose as a starting point for what I would like the Base
Guide to become.
That's what I was thinking when I saw your outline discussions ;-)
Nino
Can I put in a suggestion here?
Last year I did a course on using databases using Access. However, the
principles would be the same. They started out with a flat file
database. We learnt how to enter data, use forms, tables and reports.
Then after we had mastered that we went on to relational databases.
That was a fairly good plan I thought, as there is a lot to assimilate
when you are starting out with a new software and new concepts. Many of
the other people in the course had never used a database of any sort
before.
I always intended going through the course again this time with
OOObase, just to see how relevant the course was to OpenOffice.
This summer maybe.
So I agree that a beginner's chapter on databases should not dive
straight into relational databases until the basic steps of building a
simple database are covered.
Shelagh
The Getting started Guide has a chapter for the Base beginner:
""Getting Started with Base" which I wrote earlier. The Base Guide's:
"Introducing Base" contains a flat database created using only the
Wizard. The second chapter "Planning/designing a database" discusses the
steps required for planning and designing a database. The different
types of databases are mentioned, and the planning that must go into
planning and designing them are discussed. This involves just using the
wizards. Then we want to take the reader beyond only using the wizards.
This is for those who want more from a database than what the wizards
can produce.
One of the threads I see in the Base Guide is the use of basic
principles regardless of the complexity of the database to design it
first and then and more difficult principles to the design of the database.
Who are the people we want to reach with the Base Guide and the
"Getting Started with Base" chapter? They have a very wide range of
abilities from the person who has never used a database before to the
ones who have had training for other databases.
Dan
--
