I am a relative novice when it comes to database design and
management. I work for a company of 15-20 people, which uses a
Novell NetWare 5 network and relies heavily on our in-house
Paradox 7 database. Over the past two years I have become
increasingly involved in firstly, running queries and reports, and
more recently maintaining and developing our database. We are
considering upgrading to a client/server SQL database - something
which has been at the back of the mind of the director, who
developed
our database from scratch, for some time, but which he has not been
able to invest any time in, so has been put off. We have a 60-day
trial version of Interbase 5.6 for NetWare, which I am trialing: Does
anyone know if/when Interbase 6.0 OpenSource is being launched
for
NetWare?

I have read 'Upsizing Paradox Databases to Interbase' by James
Arias-La Rheir on the Interbase website, which is reassuring that we
are on the right track, as we are planning to continue using our
existing Paradox forms as an interim measure. Are then any other
good
introductions to interbase-conversion that I should read.
Incidentally, I was checking out the Interbase site to find an article
on the EMPLOYEE example database referred to in the manual, but
failed
to find this - anyone know where this is located.

I have a few initial random queries:

Which network protocol is most succesful in why situation: IPX/SPX
or
TCP/IP?

Which type of driver should I use as a BDE alias - the Borland
native SQL Links driver or an ODBC driver (I have a choice between
Intersolv Interbase ODBC Driver and InterBase 5.x Driver by
Visigenic)?

I have been told that SQL databases do not cope well with tabular
views on the user interface. I tested this by creating an Interbase
database with a table containg three short columns and about 40,000
rows, which comprise the main body of our people-based database.
I
then created a form which displayed this in Paradox. Initially,
scrolling through caused an error, which I fixed by creating a temp
directory on the SYS: volume where Interbase was installed on the
server - persumably Interbase performs some type of file caching.
Scrolling down then worked, but the server utilisation shot up to
100%. This also occured when I moved to the last record and when
I
changed my form to show just one record at a time. Admittedly, I am
using our old server, which has a 233MHz processor. However,
when we
ran our network from it, we would normally regard 15% as at the high
end of normal and 50% as virtually network-crippling. I am
concerned
that our GUI uses a lot of tabular-type views and scrolling down an
indexed list of records to select the correct one is a fundamental
design feature: what would happen when we have 15 users using the
Interbase database, even on our new high-spec server. Am I
missing
something fundamental about SQL databases and the way to access
information here, or is a hardware limitation? What would you
regard
as the minimum hardware spec for a server? Should I expect
Interbase
to run noticably slower than our Paradox file-based structure?

I would be grateful for any responses/comments to any of these
queries and your patience with a beginner. Please let me know if I
am
addressing these issues to the wrong newsgroup and suggest
alternatives.


Michael Melling
+44 (0)20 7375 3211

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