Wednesday, April 30, 2008
OpenOffice [sarcasm] “Great” [/sarcasm] choice of Database Engine. Or was it?
It seems that in the world of software, the proprietary software gets hits pretty badly by the Open Source Software (OSS) environment these days. For example, take MS-Office (costing hundreds of dollars) versus the free (as in $0) Open Source OpenOffice.org (OO.o). OO.o is “almost” perfect: why did the developers used the sluggish HSQL for their native Base application database engine ??? Why not use SQLite, a most efficient and lighting fast database engine?
I have been a proponent of OSS for many years now: many applications on my XP boxes and my Debian servers are Open Source. In the spirit of OSS, if I find a piece of software that I like and use regularly, I support the folks behind these applications. I believe in this Model…
OO.o though, requires a bit more delving into. While a lot of people looove to beat up on Microsoft, let’s not forget that OO.o is Sun’s baby and it appears that Sun also has its own agenda as well… Remember: “Follow the money”, nobody is faultless here… Incidentally, Sun just acquired MySQL for a ton of money! Who got that money? Did any of the OSS contributors get anything at all? Or did their work, although GPL’d, was basically free development that now Sun will benefit from? “Follow the money”… 1
As I am primarily an MS guy, the Office product used on a regular basis was MS-Office as it was primarily the tool used at work. When OO.o 1.0 came out, I moved over to it for personal and office work. My point here was that I was able to exchange documents with MS-Office folks and they did not even noticed any differences. This was just to prove a point about OO.o being transparent and a viable replacement for MS_Office…
One significant missing part for OO.o 1.0 was a Database application: it had nothing native. Period. This was fixed in OO.o V2.0 where they added the Base application. “Excellent”, said I. I was excited by this addition alone! In playing with it a bit more though, I quickly got disappointed: they used HSQL as the database engine. Argh! HSQL DB, is an interpreted Java database engine that is excruciatingly slow! No two ways about it. I have a small Movies Collection database, we’re not talking Google size DB here, and it takes forever to get a list from the Base application. And that is on the local machine!
Why on earth didn’t they use SQLite as the database engine? The answer: OO.o comes from Sun, and so does Java. Since they control the development of OO.o (see the startup screen of OO.o) AND Java, its development is to a great extent, if not all, controlled by Sun.. Thus, my take on this is: “Thou Shall Use the Java Engines”.
You see, Sun is no better than MS, or Apple (subject of another rant) when it comes to setting the rules… Had OO.o used SQLite it would have been an extraordinary product. In my humble opinion, it would have displaced the last vestige for the hangers-on of MS-Office: an alternate for MS-Access. That is my biggest beef with OO.o
How did I resolve this DB issue? Since I’m primarily a geek, I use a MySQL db on a LAN Server, with MySQL ODBC and it is much faster, even over wireless! The MySQL ODBC driver for OO.o is awsome, of course, whereas the SQLite ODBC driver for OO.o is not quite there yet! Lots of work required there as OO.o is is really hostile to SQLite, it barely gets a footnote on the OO.o site. I guess Sun’s Java must prevail indeed.
My point to all this? How will the average user ever get to use an OO.o local personal database on such a slow engine? For these average users 2, using MySQL might be a bit scary to set up and is most likely overkill! Heck! They may even decide to stick to MS_Office, I know I would!
Thus, MS is not the only bad guy to watch for… All of them need to be watched with a discerning eye! The MS folks jumping over to Apple because of MS’ shenanigans, are jumping right into Apple’s closed, proprietary environment. Who knows what surprises are there in that Environment? Who says it is better there? Darn! If only the Linux Community would get their act together… 2
Here were my thoughts on something that is …”too good to be true, is not what it really seems” …
Regards.
Footnotes
- see excellent Milking the GNU Blog posts. ^top
- to be further discussed in an upcoming rant: “Is Linux ready for the Desktop”. ^top
- subject of another upcoming rant. ^top
