[cmeisenzahl]

What's the best/closest substitute for MS-Access on the OS X platform?

A friend might switch to Apple but is pretty dependent upon MS-Access at this point?

Any recommendations?


Thanks in advance,

Chris

[Angus_D]

Take a look at FileMaker and 4th Dimension. Neither is quite the same, but they're probably the closest you're going to get.

[bbales]

There's always the Virtual PC/emulator route as well. I don't actually do this, mind you, but I know I've read about it.

[typoon]

Originally posted by bbales:
There's always the Virtual PC/emulator route as well. I don't actually do this, mind you, but I know I've read about it.

Yes it's possible to do it via VPC. I've done it a few times before when I needed to use Access.

[PubGuy]

Well, as a Microsoft Access developer, I've now been 100% Mac since just prior to OS X public beta. I've used Virtual PC to run Access on. I now have a drive image for each version of Access for development and test purposes (like having 3 PC's plus the Mac). What's great about this, is that I can also move these images to my Titanium G4 and still have the same "PC's" when I'm mobile.

VPC has been extrememly stable -- I have never crashed Windows since using VPC. Of course, I only turn on the networking feature of VPC when I need it. Another nice feature is that VPC has a feature called "undo drives" allowing you perform test installs and reboots to check out installers and validate them for distribution. When done testing, you can shut down VPC and have the option to "undo the drives" which will put it back to the exact configuration as when you started -- very cool.

Access performs acceptably under VPC. Let's face it, most of the time you're typing code or testing a program, you are not exactly taxing the system.

After a while, I wanted to start creating some native OS X programs, but was not real happy with the way FileMaker generates it's interface as compared to the GUI driven development environment of Access. I tried out REALbasic and was extermely surprised with how closely the VBA in Access and the REALbasic code matched. After getting used to it and learning its ins and outs, I could easily match the speed of developing in Access. The missing link with REALbasic was a report writer. For this, I used dbReports (now called OnTarget Reports). This allowed me to create reports in the same was as I could using the Access report generator. PLUS, the program allows you to cross-platform compile...so I was able to create a nice program in OS X and also compile a version for Windows.

Bottom line is, the fastest and easiest way to move to OS X and continue to use Access, is to use Virtual PC. As mentioned elsewhere, Windows 2000 is the fastest OS for use in Virtual PC -- even after turning off the eye-candy in XP, my XP drive image is noticeably slower than my Windows 2000 image, even after additional performance tuning as recommended at the BlackViper web site.

[gss7881]

I like the REALbasic appoach but is your database filemaker and your front end RBasic? sorry but confused alittle bit.

Very new on OS X

gss7881

[larkost]

I am going to strengthen the recommendation for FileMaker Pro. If you are looking at making self-contained (that is not referencing a SQL datatstore) database solutions then FileMaker is one of the best solutions out there. In my opinion better than Access. It has a different way of thinking about things, but once you learn it you can quickly get complex jobs done. It is also far easier to get simple jobs done by non-programmers.

If you are going to be building something really complex, then there are times where it gets in the way more than helping, but at that point you are in WebObjects territory anyways.

[gss7881]

Thanks that is helpfull !!!!

GSS