>Help - I’m a relative newcomer to the world of FoxPro and I’ve been asked to look into what course of action our clients, who have a largish piece of software written in FPW2.6, should take.
>As things are they have several large tables up to ¼ Gb, about 200 prg’s and about 250 spr’s. There are about 40 users constantly accessing various tables over a LAN. Our clients are expecting to increase by up to 4-fold the number of users. The size of all the tables is also increasing rapidly, and our clients are worried that they may be approaching the limit of FPW’s scalability.
>They are considering the following courses of action.
>
>1. Do nothing
>2. Converting to VFP.
>3. Rewrite in VFP with an Oracle backend as client/server.
>4. Rewrite in VB with an Oracle backend as client/server.
>
>I would be extremely grateful for comments from anyone who has had experience in a similar situation
>
>SimonH

IMHO, if Oracle is chosen as the backend, I would use VFP as the front end. I do that here (Dallas), and it is sooooo easy and 99.9% seamless. We have a mainframe computer here (actually resides in North Carolina) that has some national applications in a DB2 database. Because of the older version nature of DB2, we have to go through Oracle (which is running on the mainframe) to access the data via VFP or MS Access. Going through the mainframe (i.e., line-mode like we did in the early to late eighties) takes about 2 or 3 minutes minimum using their software to actually get any data. If I go through VFP and Oracle, retrieval is less than a second with an optimized query. Both ways are via T1 connections.