At 13:54 2001-10-11 +0200, you wrote:

>However, we are about to deploy an important application (IB-PHP, (and a
>few java soon) to answer the following question...) and I'm happy to hear
>the problems comes with evolutions of the structure of DB, not with
>data-working... We began to be afraid to have made a bad choice ;-)

Is your application a 24x7 ? If so, you need to schedule _some_ downtime
when you update SPs. You only need to to disconnect all users and then
reconnect again. In your case it is a web app where I assume only the web
server + extensions are connected. This will be easy to do as it does not
take long to disconnect/connect. However, if you have sustained traffic, it
might throw some users off. Check when your least traffic is.

In terms of managing data, IB is superb. We have been running a
manufacturing / financial system for 6 years now where the number of
transactions per day are in excess of a million. The organisation has NO IT
personnell and the system has been running with virtually no problems. In
the 6 years, the amount of serious maintenance it required (apart from new
stuff being implemented) is about 2 weeks (that is total hours spent). Yes,
that is VERY good... The system now has about 300 tables and some of them
has in excess of 10 million records. The DB size is 1 Gb, but this is small
compared to some of the others I have heard of...

I don't think you have made a bad choice, as long as you control the
metadata updates with properly structured procedures under the right
conditions..

regards




L.J. van Alphen
Director
Basix Automation

E-mail: lja@...
WWW: http://www.basix.co.za
Tel: (+27) (0)21-409 7018


P.O. Box 6330
Roggebaai
8012
Cape Town
South Africa