[Year 12 IPM] Database software for 2007

[Mark Kelly]

[7th attempt - our whole school has been blacklisted by SpamCop - and we 
hope we are now off the blacklist!]

Hi all.  Here's a frisky cat to throw among the pigeons.

I'm curious what database management software will people be using for
ITA Unit 3 Outcome 1 next year?

At the VITTA presentation I did on ITA in August, I recommended that if
we got organised and agreed on a standard tool we could be much more
efficient when sharing tutorials, sample tasks, tips and hints, sample
outcomes etc - all of which will be a big in 2007 as we adjust to the
new course.

The main DBMS contenders I see are:


--- MS Access
- Access is not a standard part of the average MS Office suite (AFAIK),
so many kids are unlikely to have it at home, so it would be hard to
assign homework or practice tasks using it.
- It costs big money if kids have to buy it for home.
- It costs big money for non-government schools.
- For most people, it's not as easy to learn as Filemaker is.


--- Filemaker
- Even fewer kids are likely to have Filemaker at home, so assigning
home practice would be nearly impossible.
- It's easy to learn (especially creating programming scripts) and easy
to use.
- It costs big money if kids had to buy it for home.
- It costs big money for schools to buy.

(Having said that, it's the database I use for McKinnon's reporting
package, and the database I'm most skilled with.)


--- OpenOffice.org Base
- It's FREE for students and schools.
- It's compatible with MS Access (and can read Access database files)
- It's pretty much as easy to use as Access.
- There's some online support for it, but more is coming and we can work
as a team to develop all we need!
- Did I mention it's FREE?
- It comes with other open source replacements for Word, Excel,
Powerpoint, drawing software etc.
- It even has its own equivalent of VBA for programming macros.
- Oh yeah - and it's FREE!


--- MySQL
I only include this because I've heard of one school planning to use it.
  I would not recommend it because it's far too complex for kids to
learn from scratch in VCE: too much programming required to get the job
done.  Way overkill, IMHO.



If you get some time as the year winds down, how about getting a copy of
(http://openoffice.org) - it's about 50M to download, and is available
via WWW and Bittorrent.

Have a play, see what you think.

Cheers

Mark K

-- 
Mark Kelly
Manager - Information Systems
McKinnon Secondary College
McKinnon Rd McKinnon 3204, Victoria, Australia
Direct line / Voicemail: 8520 9085
School Phone +613 8520 9000  <<< NEW NUMBER
School Fax +613 95789253

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