>>PB used to be an independent company, and it was mainly used for building front-ends for Oracle and Sybase. Now that Sybase owns PB, I see a potential conflict of development interests with respect to maintaining full capabilities with newer versions of Oracle.
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>Mark,
>
>It's certainly true that a potential conflict exists, but this is really no different than VFP and SQL Server. Microsoft clearly has an incentive to make their front-end products work better with SQL Server than competing products. I'm not saying MS is doing this, but any time a company sells multiple types of software that have to work together this potential conflict exists.

Point well taken. I would counter by asking if PB continues to advance their product, to invent new technology, to set standards. I suggest MS, in many ways, is setting standards, advancing technology while PB has not made many advances since their major upgrade 3 yeares ago (PB 6?). Another place where VFP beats them is support for both remote data and local tables and views with the ability to transparently [to the user] switch between the types.

To further elaborate on your point, the ODBC drivers provided by MS work better, with respect to MS front-ends, on Oracle back-ends than the drivers provided by Oracle. I can not speak for the Oracle front-end development products. I assume the Oracle drivers work fine with their own tools. So, I think you need to keep like products together on the client side.

I also think it behooves MS competitors to figure out how to best compete with MS before it is too late. For example, our standard word processing software is WordPerfect, but we are slowly moving to Word [and the Office suite] because of the ease of integration with each other and VFP. If WP had been smart over the last 2 or 3 years, they would have made advances toward making their product more OLE friendly.