Re: Converting 4GL to Unix-C/SQL

In article <1ukqnh$1kb@otter.mrj.com> swgrist@otter.mrj.com (Steve W. Grist) writes: >Has anyone out there converted 4GL to Unix-C and SQL. > > I am interested in doing this for performance reasons. Before committing to such a conversion, I would take a *detailed* look at the structure of the programs you are going to convert. At least inspect some of your worst and least offenders. This is because converting to C will have no effect on many of the things that an I4GL program does. This is probably also true of any vendor's DBMS product that uses a client/server architecture. First, converting the client from 4GL to C will have no effect on the database engine (server). Further, many of the operations that we tend to think of as "in-line" 4GL code are performed by calls to pre-compiled vendor supplied functions. These would also be unaffected. Then there is the consideration that your programs may alread be in C if you have the "c4gl" version of I4GL -- not pretty C, but C nonetheless :-). If you have the RDS version, it would still be worth your time to do some benchmarking. Of course there are programs whose performance could be greatly improved by being converted from 4GL to C, but I would not presume that such a conversion would be any kind of panacea. If you are having performance problems with Informix-4GL programs, perhaps you could post more details, such as what specific Informix utilities you are using, platform, OS, etc. If your original question was more generic than just applying to Informix, most of the above comments still hold. Hope this helps, Walt. -- Walt Hultgren Internet: walt@rmy.emory.edu (IP 128.140.8.1) Emory University UUCP: {...,gatech,rutgers,uunet}!emory!rmy!walt 954 Gatewood Road, NE BITNET: walt@EMORY Atlanta, GA 30329 USA Voice: +1 404 727 0648