I've been programming in Paradox since DOS, but one mail-order database is getting rather large (100K client records, and associated orders, etc).

Our client wants us to move to Filemaker. In fact he'd like to have a 3rd party write the programme and me maintain it. The current package has been written & maintained by myself, with an awful lot lot going on in the Object PAL code.

I already have a copy (legal) of SQL Server & 10 licences for Access, and think that's a better option to re-develop in (although I could do with some training in both).

What are the pros & cons for each app, and what would people recommend. I'm going to cross-post into Access / SQL Server & Filemaker forums to get an equal view.

Thanks

Mark

Client-server applications appear (to me) to be the cutting edge in RDBMS today. I've programmed in Paradox for years and, although it appears to still be viable for a time, Corel has depricated it and Borland has depricated the BDE. So, I think Paradox is in trouble in the next several years. It is my understanding that Filemaker is based on a desktop application, like Paradox, that has been extended to client-server applications. When I moved away from Paradox, I did some extensive reading about the options, and didn't give particularly strong consideration to Filemaker. After several weeks of research, I settled on PostgreSQL. It is a very powerful open-source database program with a strong user group. It is entirely free. I appreciated the power of Paradox (in its time) and feel that PostgreSQL has considerably more features, so I haven't lost a thing in making the transition. For the front end, I am using Java Eclipse.

There has been something of a learning curve with PostgreSQL and Eclipse, for sure. However, I feel it has been worthwhile in bringing my application - and my skills - into the modern age!

Hope this is of interest. Also, you might want to search this list for additional opinions. The topic has been discussed a couple of times in the past six months.

Oracle has recently put a free version of it's 10G RDBMS out the only caveats is it will not run database servers using 2 cpu's and with more than 2GB of Tablespace. (A server by their definitition is an instance of the database running in RAM so you can have multiple 2GB servers running.) I think it is a perfect option, lots of tools and standardization and if you build something really useful it is portable to ERP's on a gigantic scale! I too still like and use Paradox, and may actually use it as a front end for my Oracle databases I am building. That will conserve code as well.

In my opinion, you should stick with Pdox for the client side, and use Firebird/Interbase for the server side.

STAY AWAY from Access. It's simply programming shit; a language/ide where the code is not inside the object to which is bind, so that if you copy a button on another form, it loses all the code, it's simply something that should be REJECTED. The only reason it hasn't gone down the drain immediately it's that it's marketed by M$, that can turn shit into gold.

MS SQL is indeed a good SQL server, but then you should turn to a IDE such as visual studio, and learn a real language which is NOT visual basic classic (shit as Access) but some like C, C++, C#.

A good alternative is Delphi, which is much more similar to OPAL, but as i said before, i think the most viable solution is sticking with paradox for the client side (i'm speaking Pdox for windows, for which you can get for a small amount a runtime which can be installed on as many cliente as you wish WITHOUT spending more money) and choosing whatever SQL server does run well with it.

Bye!