I'll make a plug for SQLite, which has the big benefit of the entire database being stored in a single file, which makes it easy to copy and move around your databases. SQLite has active development and is quite robust with good help and a good data model. http://sqlite.org/ You can use various ways to communicate with an SQLite database, including Python, R (as Thiago Silva notes below), and many others. Perhaps one of the nicest GUIs is the firefox add-on, which I assume means that it works on Mac. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sqlite-manager/ As with MySQL, you'll end up needing to know SQL a bit more than you would with MS Access, but that might not be a bad thing! Tim Howard NY Natural Heritage Program
>>> Thiago Silva <[email protected]> 6/6/2012 1:29 AM >>> If it is a relatively simple, single user database, getting the data into MySQL or the like might be less involved than it first seems. A day well spent reading the user guide and the innumerous online tutorials will probably get you going (it did for me). There is also the MySQL workbench GUI, that facilitates common management tasks. If there's not a lot of different tables to be related/joined, and you just want a DBMS to take advantage of SQL, I suggest storing everythting in csv format, and using the "sqldf" package in R. What it does is convert a dataframe into a SQLite database on the fly, run the SQL query on it, and return the result as a new data frame. It has worked very well in my experience. Thiago S. F. Silva Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais São José dos Campos - Brazil Sent from my iPad On 2012-06-05, at 7:57 PM, Andrew Digby <[email protected]> wrote: > I'd definitely recommend Filemaker Pro. Being widely used commercially it's unfortunately not cheap, > but for my (PhD) work it's been well worth the cost for its power and simplicity. > > I also investigated MySQL, but found it way too involved for the simple single-user database I > required. > > I'd be interested to hear of any other options though. I'm surprised relational databases aren't more > heavily used in ecology, and am horrified by how many people trust their data to MS Excel! > > Andrew
