My name is Kevin Lee, and I'm the IT manager for a small international courier company in London. I maintain a DataEase for Dos (v5.17) database (3.5Gb, 250+ forms, 1500+ DQL procedures).

As Gordon says, like most small companies the IT Budget is next to nothing (and nothing would be the prefered option!) however as the DataEase database is the heart of the company it's imperitive that it works flawlessly 24/7 for around 20 users. I also maintain the companies MySQL database that is the heart of the client facing web application(written in Pearl by a contractor), which intefaces with DFD using csv file transferes.

I did dabble several times over the years with DFW, but each time stopped because of the stability issues and lack of compatibility with MySQL data.

Hi, Kevin,

Welcome aboard. Your story is similar to thousands of others I think. My thoughts are that as long as you can control what hardware you use and what operating system you use you will be ok with DFD.

Still, as my partner Graham likes to point out, you may still be one new patch away from disaster. What's Plan B?

Hi Phil, and thank you.

Yes, hardware is becoming a pain. Recently building a hot standby replacement for the Novell 5.1 server (now done) was a drag. For the medium term we are sticking with PC's using XP(sp2) which should keep us happily safe in our 1990's bubble for a while longer...

As for Plan B? Yes … deep sigh! Continuing to try to get to grips with alternative database tools (currently attempting Alpha Five!). The problem with many of these tools is that while these days they tick all the feature box's, look very pretty, and are easy to setup, as soon as you dig deeper they have years of learning curve needed to reliably replace logic in our DFD system.

So, I'm still (vainly?) hoping that DataEase, and these days Ffenics will survive and finally mature enough to do what we've always needed; namely being able to read/write properly with our MySQL database (date/time fields!). And in a perfect world also able to at least read and write back to DFD tables!?!

I guess that these have been on everyone's wish lists for many years now so this is unlikely, but for some strange reason I still keep poking my head in here in hope. Yesterday was the first time in a few months - only to have my whole evening utterly ruined by the tragic news about Trina.

Anyway - fingers crossed...

Kevin,

You are clearly on top of things. One of our clients in Houston is shuttling data back and forth to SQL for the generation of sophisticated reports among other things. I'm not sure what all is being done on the SQL except that it is a major effort and I provide the DFD export/import routines in DFD. Nick Jones is our network/scripting/sql expert.

Yes, Alpha has a learning curve and you must learn scripting. DataEase has certainly spoiled us, hasn't it? Still, using Ff preserves most all of your business rules and that is where most other platforms come up short or you must learn VB to enforce them. As for Alpha, Steve Wood, a long time DataEase consultant, has become quite the guru with it.