Re: New-Era, how good is it?

David Paulo (david@inform.co.nz) wrote: : In article <3s42b7$6ci@dingo.cc.uq.oz.au>, scott@vetpath.vet.uq.oz.au (Scott McClintock) writes: : <Lots of good stuff snipped> : > We could not get comfortable with ODBC in comparison whereas NewEra does : > have a Informix 4GL heritage that enables us to do a lot of things that : > would take a circus act in ODBC. : Scott (or anybody else) : Could you expand on this a bit please? We are using New Era but we want : to retain database independace. Will New Era still help us avoid the : 'Circus Act'? I must admit that my statement regarding the 'Circus Act' was perhaps a little subjective. I'll try and be a bit more objective. A little background first though. Our client was very keen to use Visual Basic to do the GUI user interface stuff but has had an absulte nightmare with a BTrieve based system and so was very keen to use a decent UNIX based RDBMS. We took a good hard look at VB from an ODBC point of view and found that a lot of very ordinary things (ie grab a single row from a table or do a quick update) took generally at least twice as much code as we had been traditionally used to in 4GL. We like our code to be readable and we felt (in our humble opinion) that the code was going to start looking ugly given that the application was by no means trivial. We were also concerned about the fairly ordinary performance of ODBC drivers (we tried SQL-Retriever and had feedback from other people re other versions). Our conclusion was that whilst VB had some nice features (in particular a neat and fast development environment) it did not have the "power" that we needed. New-Era on the other hand is more or less a full blown 4GL++ type language and is a lot more scalable in our opinion. In answer to your second question, how much of a circus act you go through with ODBC depends a lot on how the language you are using interfaces with the ODBC API. It seems to me that New-Era does a fairly good job of it and the ixSQLConnect & ixSQLStmt classes provide you with a lot of power. Aside from this, I can't really comment any further as Database independance is not an issue in this first project of ours. I hope this rambling has been somewhat useful. We're still learning so maybe in a couple of months we might be able to comment with the benefit of hindsight! regards Scott.