Re: OnLine / Optical?

In article <40u35m$ll7@cssun.mathcs.emory.edu>, phr@fmsc.com.au (Peter Harris) wrote: > >People, > >We are looking for a way of making accessible archives, and wondering >about OnLine/Optical? We use Online 7.1 as a back end and it would be >neat if our application could access archived data transparently. Is this >what OnLine/Optical is for? What sort of optical devices are supported? >Worm, cd-rom (and burner), Juke boxes? What are the mechanics of building >dbspaces and populating them with data on these devices? > Basically with Online/Optical you can specify an optical family - similar to a BLOBSPACE that you can store BYTES columns on. It sounds like you want to store other column types on it. You'rd have to write some pack and unpack routines to store archived data in a bytes column for this. You also need a product that would control the optical media. These are third part products. One is available from Recognition International and is called Storage Manager - supports lots of 5 1/4", 12" and 14" WORM devices. See http://www.plx.com for contact details. Another is from Consistency Point Technologies, called OptiLink. They also havea 'C' API that allows you to Optical Storage enable existing applications. OptiLink supports all the major hardware vendors, the major UNIX vendors and NT. Pricing is slot base and is very competitive with existing product offerings. Check out http://www.cpt.com Chris ---------------------------------------------------------- Chris McKay Internet: chrism@iconz.co.nz Green Door Software Ltd Compu$erve: 100242,1003 P.O. Box 67-107, Mt Eden, URL: http://softcopy.com/chris Auckland, New Zealand. Phone/Fax: +64 9 376 2792 ----------------------------------------------------------