Whatever Happened to Lotus Approach?

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A reader of my blog asked me what seemed like a simple enough question:

Whatever happened to Lotus Approach? I loved that personal db. (thoughit's been awhile...)

Of course, researching an answer, I encountered some interesting new information. Interestingly, everyone tries to "read between the lines" and tries to determine what solution is best.

From a colleague from Lotus:

You can still get [Lotus Approach] as part of Smartsuite.

However, I have to assume his real question is ... "what is the quick and easy way for me to build a lightweight database app like Microsoft Access that I can distribute as a standalone executable?"

To which I would say "Lotus has a program called Approach, which is part of Lotus SmartSuite, which some people still use. However, a lot of the focus in IBM now centers around the lightweight Cloudscape database which IBM acquired from Informix, which is now known as the [open source project called Derby]. Many IBM and Lotus products, such as Lotus Expeditor use the JDBC connection to Derby, which allows you to use Windows, Linux, Flash, etc. ... with no vendor lock in".

I am familiar with Cloudscape, and I evaluated it as a potential database for IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center, when I was the lead architect defining the version 1 release. It runs entirely on Java, which is both a plus and minus. Plus in that it runs anywhere Java runs, but a minus in that it is not optimized for high performance or large scalability. Because of this, we decided instead on using the full commercial DB2 database instead for Productivity Center.

Not to be undone, my colleagues over at DB2 offered a different alternative, [DB2 Express-C], which runs on a variety of Windows, Linux-x86, and Linux on POWER platforms. It is "free" as in beer, not free as in speech, which means you can download and use it today at no charge, and even ship products with it included, but you are not allowed to modify and distribute altered versions of it, as you can with "free as in speech" open source code, as in the case of Derby above (see [Apache License 2.0"] for details).

(If you have no idea what I am talking about in my distinction between "free speech" and "free beer", see Simon Phipps' article[Perspective: Free speech, free beer and free software] orthe definition from the [Free Software Foundation].)

As I see it, DB2 Express-C has two key advantages. First, if you like the free version, you can purchase a "support contract" for those that need extra hand-holding, or are using this as part of a commercial business venture. Second,for those who do prefer vendor lock-in, it is easyto upgrade Express-C to the full IBM DB2 database product, so if you are developing a product intended for use with DB2, you can develop it first with DB2 Express-C, and migrate up to full DB2 commercial version when you are ready.

This is perhaps more information than you probably expected for such a simple question. Meanwhile, I am stilltrying to figure out MySQL as part of my [OLPC volunteer project].

technorati tags: IBM, Lotus, Approach, SmartSuite, TotalStorage, Productivity Center, Cloudscape, Apache, Derby, free, speech, beer, DB2, Express-C, Windows, Linux, POWER, open source