As you may already know, Bento 4 is being discontinued as of 30 September. I was wondering whether it was a good program to learn the basics of databases on? There are other learning resources for it that might make it worth while. So is it useful for a database beginner like me? Thanks in advance.

I suspect though that apart from a few basic concepts a lot of what you'd learn on Bento wouldn't be that transferrable to something else like Access, let alone anything bigger. So, given Bento is going out of support, unless you've got some specific database task you need to do, it might not be that useful in the long run.

Personally, I'd probably advise spending the money on a basic database theory book and a basic SQL book and then install something like the MAMP or Valentina along with Navicat Essentials or Sequel Pro. Those together will probably give you a better grounding than just using Bento would. This also looks quite amusing, although I haven't tried it.

(NOTE: I know suggesting MYSQL to someone as 'first lesson in databases' is rather crazy, but the bare fact is if Bento is on the way out there really isn't that much left on the Mac that isn't SQL based.)

I was thinking of using it as a stepping stool towards learning Filemaker but that might not be practical.

Ah, I see. I honestly don't know how similar those products are. I used an earlier version of Bento but I"ve never used FileMaker.

They are from the same company. Apple apparently own FileMaker.


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