Obviously I’m new to database management. I’m finding the learning curve to pretty steep. All help is appreciated. My question today is about the advantages of, or reasons for, using a “backend” database manager (MySQL or H2) along with LibreOffice Base as the “frontend”. I can easily enough see the advantages of using Base as a frontend, but why do I need another program to store the data in?
The Base database is really only useful if you interface with it via the Base frontend. Using a separate backend can provide a plethora of advantages, although many of them may not be useful to you. For example: if you interfaced with MySQL, you could use the backend as an application database as well. MySQL is frequently used in web applications, so having the web application database shared with the database that you can manually work with is very useful. While the Base database is designed to take up minimal space on your disk and be relatively simple, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, H2, Oracle and MS SQL are all designed with performance and high scalability in mind. If you don’t already have one of these databases, there probably isn’t an immediate need for you to use one. However, if one exists, you can use base to interface with it easily!