Re: ODBC: Openlink, Intersolv or Informix?

William, The issue re. Visual Basic is a long story, but once you understand what is happening under the covers it becomes clearer as to the source of the problem. 1993-95 - Visual Basic was driven via DAO, this in turn used JET Engine to connect to ODBC Drivers. The JET Engine was generally perceived to be a source of ODBC performance bottlenecks as most ODBC end-users (and developers for that matter) didn't quite understand the manner in which JET utilized the ODBC API. The problem was that JET included a Scrollable Cursor emulation layer that was built atop ODBC (for good reason) but most people didn't understand its use at the time. 1995-97 - Bad press for DAO forces Microsoft to remove the inherent dependency on JET within DAO by providing ODBCDriect, unfortunately this didn't catch on that much either. Developers lost the Scrollability provided by JET and bulked at the new amount of worked they had to take on in this area, in short they now had to write what JET provided gratis. Microsoft then introduces RDO, which provided the ability to use Scrollable Cursor emulations via a Cursor Library aka. client-side cursors (this library was always available outside the VB space but put to use primarily by driver vendors). Server side cursors left Scrollability to the Driver Developers (only Microsoft & OpenLink supported the Scrollable cursor requirements of RDO). 1997-Present Date - Microsoft is strategically pushing OLE-DB and seeks to have ADO (ActiveX Data Objects) as the new Data Access abstraction layer into both Native OLE-DB Data Providers and ODBC Drivers. Like RDO this has both client-side & server-side scrollable cursor requirements, and simply presents the same challenges to ODBC Driver Developers & Vendors. The moral of this story is simply this: Knowledge is power ! If there was a better understanding of the real data access issues, then the dependency on vendor propaganda and the need to draw inferences from the sinful silence of technology vendors would simply have less of a bearing on product purchasing decisions and the ultimate success of organizations investing in data access technology & development tools world-wide. Its all about Scrollable cursors and the inability of most ODBC Driver Vendors to support this functionality. OpenLink as an ODBC Driver vendor strategically decided to bite the bullet a few years back, we built a Scrollable Cursor Engine that works across all of our supported backend databases. Microsoft have done the same but for SQL Server only, the Microsoft Cursor Library on supports 2 of the 5 cursor models: 1. Forward Only 2. Static 3. Keyset 4. Mixed 5. Dynamic If you need Drivers that will enable you to use VB or other Cursor centric ODBC clients against your existing databases then simply visit our Web Site: to download a free non expiring evaluation copy: http://www.openlinksw.com Regards, Kingsley Idehen President & CEO OpenLink Software William Harris wrote in message <74out2$ouf$2@malgudi.oar.net>... >In article <74o8nn$dsq$1@starburst.uk.insnet.net>, jclynes@family.co.uk >says... >>Should my manager grant my wishes for christmas, what route would you >>recommend to upgrading new era? >>My plan was to just rewrite most stuff in VB and something a little more >>powerful for any batch type processing. > >Don't stab yourself in the back like that! We've been (trying) to use VB for >a while now and it is a monster for database access; with each version, >Microsoft tries to get database access right and in each version they more or >less fail. DAO to RDO to ADO to ??? > >Almost anything on the shelf (Delphi, Powerbuilder, you fill in the blank) >would be preferable. >-- >William Harris (nursing the many burns VB has inflicted on me) >