Maybe you can use Access as the front end to SQLite?

During my internship 25 years ago I build a system to register aircraft accidents and near accidents. This system used access 1.0 (Windows 3.1) as the front end, storing the data in Oracle 6, I think connected through Odbc.

Yup, ODBC still works: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/administer-odbc-dat... though because this is Microsoft and we can’t have nice things, it might not: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/access/...

For SQLite there’s https://github.com/softace/sqliteodbc but at that point I might pick a different DB for a more established ODBC driver. Or just use Access...

But this requires admin access to install? No?

yes it requires admin access

Why would you do that though? The underlying database technology is not really one of the problems access has.

Sure it is ... the database underlying Access uses JetSQL which has its own fun syntactic quirks

It's also very bad at concurrent users if you do go down the path of dropping it on a network share if it's a normalized schema, since there's no server to cache queries or do optimizations... for strictly data entry against a simple schema you can maybe push it to low 100s of users, but backing up / restoring / rolling out new versions is a nightmare when the frontend and backend are commingled like that. You can deploy different versions of .mdbs if you have an external backend, though I've never seen anyone do so with an Access database backing an Access "UI" project...

cross-platform might be one reason.

Open/LibreOffice Base does have backends for MySQL and PostgreSQL already

I tried open office base about 10 years ago and it was almost but not quite impossible to use. Has it improved?

I wish it was this easy to connect sqlite

I tried doing this once with Go, hoping for a static binary, but SQLite library requires glibc.

There’s a huge need for a sql-compatible sqite-like database for this purpose in Go.

So, link in glibc statically?

I may be wrong, but sqlite is used a lot on Android which uses bionic, not glibc right? So it seems like there should be hope of switching to another libc if you need.

With sqlite3 package and Go this doesn’t look possible, or at least not easy.

https://github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3/issues/212#issuecomment-...

The hard part is the [nested] forms. Access and FileMaker have polished interfaces which would take a lot of man-hours to recreate. Maybe Electron or an SPA built in React.