Loyal readers will recall my blog posting from Southwest Fox which recounted Ken Levy’s discussion about Sybase Advantage Database Server, and what a wonderful upgrade path it is for Visual FoxPro developers looking to create client/server apps from their existing databases without abandoning their existing functioning apps.
Last night Jay Wendt and Chris Franz from Sybase took a detour after their presentation at Chicago’s FoxPro User/Developer’s Group to come up to Madison to give a presentation to the Madison FoxPro Users Group. However MadFox wasn’t meeting last night, so we booked ’em for the more general Madison PC Users Group meeting. Chris and Jay toned down the technical details of the Advantage Database Server and gave a very interesting rundown of the features of their product. I’m not going to recount them all here, you can certainly read that for yourself, but here are a couple of the highlights that make this product interesting for me:
- Can use VFP tables as the data store, without breaking existing apps (I can’t drive this one home enough)
- Very low cost of ownership (~ $100/ seat, with no recurring fees)
- Participates in MS clustering, giving you a high availability solution at a low cost
- There’s a .NET DataReader class that allows you to traverse the data in an xBase type manner familiar to VFP developers
Big thanks to Jay and Chris for coming up to Madison, and thanks for the USB drives with the installation on it.
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