Base And Gnucash

[John Ralls]

On Apr 29, 2013, at 10:57 AM, blfs at comcast.net wrote:

> I do not understand your reply.  We are using a program based on Access for our accounting.
> 
> I would dearly like a solution without Microsoft.
> 

Which is utterly orthogonal to your original post.
But did you mean Base [1], as in the database part of Open/Libre Office? I thought
that you meant BASE [2], a set of criteria for designing database management programs.

Gnucash isn't based on OpenOffice's Base because Gnucash predates StarOffice (Open/Libre Office's original name) by more than 2 years and wasn't written as a relational database application. It's written around an in-memory query engine called Query Object Framework [3].

While we're working slowly towards redesigning Gnucash to replace QOF with a live SQL database backend, we're not likely to use Open/Libre Office because of the huge dependency load that would entail. The SQL backend that we use now is based on LibDBI, which mostly abstracts away the details of different SQL databases. We support SQLite3, MySQL, and PostgresQL.

Regards,
John Ralls

[1] http://www.libreoffice.org/features/base/
[2] http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1394128
[3] http://sourceforge.net/projects/qof/