Creating a Contacts Database in OpenOffice Connecting to MySQL or PostgreSQL Carla Schroder
Thursday, March 20, 2008 04:36:32 PM
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.
