Off-topic - please post in the appropriate forum.
Thank you.
Helen (Moderator)

At 10:14 AM 06-10-00 +0100, you wrote:

>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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