This is the Big Enchalada; our company was born and bred on DOS for the
past several years, and we've got the legacy in-house apps to prove it.
Specifically, we have an immense body of software written to do database
conversions in MS FoxPro, now ported to Visual FoxPro and running on NT
machines.
Needless to say, there would be reams of reasons to start doing some of
this stuff on a Linux platform, but while we do have one programmer
currently familiarizing himself with C indexing routines, by and large
we're pretty blind when it comes to database manipulation in the *n*x
world. This is even more silly when you consider that more and more of
our customers and vendors are on unix (or AIX).
The goal isn't really to port all of our existing apps to Linux; that
would just be too much work and for now FoxPro is adequate for most of
the jobs we do. But I'm convinced that our long-term efficiency would
get a boost if we gradually found Linux ways of running conversions.
Can anyone point me to some signposts? Is Oracle worth the money and
learning curve (and if so will it run on Linux)? We already know we
hate Informix, and all accounts (some admittedly a couple of years old)
have said that FoxPro is a dog on unix.
When I've been to the web sites that list applications for Linux, the
database programs seemed to be tilted more toward using and maintaining
databases than toward manipulating them, so it's been difficult to
select packages to try out. What we really need is a grown-up version
of FoxPro, basically a fast, powerful set of database manipulation
routines and some sort of front end for controlling them. All that
fancy user-interface stuff and database maintainance tools would
probably go to waste around here. But writing all of that from scratch
in C (or whatever) seems like it would be not only terribly tedious but
probably reinventing the wheel as well.
As usual, all thoughts and wild conjecture welcome; this is a long-range
project and I don't need to put anything in place any time soon.
-m
--
PLEASE read the Red Hat FAQ, Tips, Errata and the MAILING LIST ARCHIVES!
http://www.redhat.com/RedHat-FAQ /RedHat-Errata /RedHat-Tips /mailing-lists
To unsubscribe: mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with
"unsubscribe" as the Subject.
