Creating a Contacts Database in OpenOffice - page 2

Managing Contacts

You need special drivers to connect to a MySQL or PostgreSQL database, or any other external database. In Debian (and the *buntu family and Mepis and all of its many offspring) you need the unixodbc package for ODBC support, plus the driver specific to your database:

• odbc-postgresql for PostgreSQL
• libmyodbc for MySQL
• libsqliteodbc for sqlite
• mdbtools for MS Access
• tdsodbc for Sybase SQL and MS SQL

Another option for PostgreSQL is the openoffice.org-sdbc-postgresql package, which replaces both the ODBC and JDBC drivers.

You can also use the JDBC drivers:

• openoffice.org-sdbc-postgresql
• libpg-java for PostgreSQL
• libmysql-java for MySQL

Fedora has different package names, and it does not include as many as Debian:

• unixODBC.i386
• postgresql-odbc.i386
• mysql-connector-odbc.i386
• postgresql-jdbc.i386
• mysql-connector-java.i386

Any drivers that you can't find in your distribution can be downloaded from OpenOffice.org (see Resources), or from the vendor of your database. What's the difference between ODBC and JDBC drivers? There are some differences in speed and functionality. JDBC drivers are cross-platform, though I'm not sure why that should matter to anyone but developers. If you have problems connecting Base to an external database, try exporting just the data you want to use into a .csv file, and then import that into Base. Base loves correctly-formed delimited text files, and it's an easy hack for non-database gurus.