Re: Connect to two database engines at same time?

In article <4j6pq7$l1f@jaxnet.jaxnet.com>, chs@jaxnet.com (Children's Home Society Of Florida) wrote: >Our company currently uses informix-se on a UNIX platform for our >accounting applications. This same vendor has a DOS based human >services application written in clipper. They tell me that they are >currently writing an interface (MS-Windows based using Delphi) which >will tie the two databases together in order to be able perform some >cost analysis. > >Question is can an application connect to two different database >engines and open a table from each of the two at the same time. Sure. Delphi is great at this sort of thing. It'll even support heterogenous joins (although at what performance cost I wouldn't like to guess). >Possible configurations: > 1. informix-se and Dbase > 2. informix-se and SQL Anywhere (Watcom SQL) > 3. informix-se and MS SQL Server > >If possible, any ideas on how difficult this will be to set up and >maintain or other caveats. If these will be distinct databases then you shouldn't have any problems. If you're planning on having the same database structure in any of three databases, and switching between them at will, then you might encounter some problems: Some databases require tables to be referenced as owner.table, will others are "table" only. Some have upper-case-only column names, others have lower-case-only, and (I think) some allow mixed case names. You might also need to check implementation of "unusual" datatypes like "interval". Regards, Kerry S ------------------------------------,------------------------------------------ Kerry Sainsbury, kerry@kcbbs.gen.nz | THE INFORMIX FAQ v2.4 Oct 95 Quanta Systems, Auckland | http://www.iiug.org/techinfo/faq/ New Zealand. Work: +64 9 377-4473 | ftp://ftp.iiug.org/pub/informix/faq Home: +64 9 279-3571 | ftp://kcbbs.gen.nz:/pub/informix/