Users making the transition from Microsoft Office will have no problem with either, and will find StarDraw a welcome addition to their toolkit. StarOffice Base provides the suite with a general-purpose relational database with enough graphical interface elements to keep it relatively simple. Base can deal with dBase, DB2, ODBC, JDBC, and Adabas databases. The online documentation promotes the use of the Adabas database engine heavily. A user experienced with the use of Microsoft's Access will feel largely at home with Base once the interface differences are worked out.
Tables are easy to create and design.
Establishing relationships wasn't so easy to figure out, though we did with a little elbow grease. In all, StarOffice Base struck us as more of a front-end tool for existing databases than an actual development platform for them. This isn't a complaint about Base, since we doubt any serious database designers care to use a tool like this to work and suspect StarOffice's designers know this. As a front-end, Base is solid enough and will allow most office users to extract information from an existing database and put it to use throughout StarOffice. Taken on their own merits, though, we were reasonably satisfied with the functionality to be found in each.