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Sybase Advantage Database Server, with Ken Levy

Posted on 16. Oct, 2009 by Eric in FoxPro

Suppose you’ve got a VFP app that’s running perfectly well, but you want to integrate it with your fancy new ASP.Net portal.  Or you’re running into the 2 GB file limit in VFP. Or you want to access your VFP data from across the WAN.  Sybase Advantage Database server is a great solution for overcoming these problems.

It’s always great to see Ken Levy present. The first time I saw him was back at Devcon in San Diego back in ’95. We were both younger than, and he had a lot more hair of course.  But he’s still the same energetic, super-smart guy who puts on a great presentation! He was giving this because he is interested in the product himself, not because he’s working for Sybase.  That’s a good sign.

What this product does in a nutshell is allow you to point a real database server at a collection of VFP tables, thus enabling client-server functionality on those tables without modifying them in any way.  You can simultaneously read and write to those tables with VFP and through the client-server engine.  And the server has drivers for .NET and ODBC, enabling essentially any other client to access your VFP tables as if they were, say SQL Server.  Pause and think about what this will do for your apps.

Here are some of the other VFP  limitations this product overcomes:

• Building a .NET system side-by-side while VFP continues to run (with DBFs)
• Don’t have to use ADO drivers in .NET to get VFP data
• Live Backups
• Greater than 2GB limits
• Full text searching

And all of this at a very reasonable price (~$100/seat, with no ongoing maintenance). All of the attendees here got a 2-user developer version of ADS 9.1 to play with.  The trick will be convincing our clients to implement this!