Thanks for your responses. Here's some more detail about my situation.

We currently maintain a registry database in FileMaker Server, which is getting crowded, and I want to move to a more robust platform. Our partner company maintains a MS-SQL-based web site that customers can use to review and update their data, including some information pulled from our registry. Our staff will be doing a combination of manual data entry and importing of customer-provided electronic files into our database. In addition, the partner's web-site users will be doing data entry of their own. We need to replicate our data to the partner's web site, and a subset of their data needs to come back to us, but it needs to be queued for review by our staff, not just accepted.

We need to be able to replicate our data to their servers on a regular basis. Currently, we're generating a simple export file once per day. I want a more frequent, more direct update, but I don't want a real-time update. Every fifteen minutes or half-hour seems reasonable, but at least once per hour.

The partner's site tracks quite a bit of additional information above and beyond what we keep track of, so we only need a subset of their records to come back to us. Since it needs to be approved by our staff, this should be more of an on-demand function than a real-time or scheduled update. The relevant transactions from the web site could accumulate in a temporary table here, then be integrated into our database on demand.

I really like what I've seen of Interbase, and I especially like the possibility of hosting the database on Linux, but I need to know if this can be done without serious hassle. From your comments, it sounds like what I'm describing should be feasible. Are there any articles, web sites, books, etc. that would help me out? What about security issues?

Thanks again for your assistance!



Cheers,

Bill Mercer - National Center for Construction Education and Research
Phone 352-334-0911
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