I came from a Borland's Paradox world and after that moved to Access 95-97-2000-2002.
However, most of my work as a developer has been done with Sybase, SQL Anywhere and right now I am working with MySQL. I know nothing about Lotus Approach or FileMaker. I am still working some stuffs with Access, like travel expenses for my own firm, and sometimes for creating quick reports with data extracted from of a DB server. Access/Paradox (I don't know about Approach/FileMaker, but I guess these belong to this category too) and MySQL/PostgreSQL/Sybase/SQL Server/Oracle/DB2 are in different ball games. For the first category, most of the work is done by the client while in the second one the workload is carried by the server. Selecting a db from a group or the other is a matter of what your application will do. If your expected use of the DB points to a small databases on a fast network you can go with the first group. For heavy load, large databases, large number of users or slow connections (like the Internet) goes with the second category. Security also defines the group to pick from. In other words, if we are looking for a personal database, MySQL/Sybase/Oracle/SQL Server/PostgreSQL/DB2 might not be the best choices unless there are no more choices. In this later case, chose between MySQL and PostgreSQL. Personal databases should be easy to use in the sense of creating tables, queries, reports and data entry forms. As I am new to Linux I don't know any nice front-end for these tasks. I will take a look at pgaccess. Regards, Adolfo
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