Hi guys,

I've been dithering about for a week or so, trying to choose a framework, with a view to migrating our app to an Oracle back end.

Here's what we're trying to do. We have a legacy billing application, entirely written in VFP, which supports a revenue stream Europe-wide of about $300 million. How's that for a success story? For all kinds of reasons (mostly to do with appearing to have a "serious" app, we're considering porting the database to Oracle. While we're at it, I'd like to rework the app into a a 3-tier client-server app, (even if we decide that the middle tier should reside on each workstation, as an in-process server - don't know yet).

Now, how should we go about manipulating the data in the Oracle database? Remote views would probably be good for the form (UI) stuff, but this is hardly 3-tier is it?. We've been looking at SQL pass-through as well, but it does seem a lot of hard work. And then again, the two Explorer controls we've been looking at (Protoview and DBI-Tech) can apparently bind to ADO recordsets, which is another area in which my knowledge is hazy, to say the least. I'm a little wary of ODBC, since I've had performance problems with it the past (this may be solved now - does anyone know?), but Oracle supplies a native OLE DB manager, which cuts out the need for ODBC. Is this any faster? Are there any traps to using this? Anyone out there with experience of this?

Finally, how does all this map onto the choice of a framework? Will the choise of a framework cut down my options? MM apparently doesn't support SQL pass-though. Does it support ADO? Do VFE and CodeMine? I know that VFE maps data access onto a cursor object (hence the overhead and resulting performance hit), which means we should be able to do something in the ADO world, by subclassing their cCursor class. CodeMine uses some kind of Data Access layer, which is different to the business object approach, so how much of the above does it support?

So here I am in full "dither" mode. If anyone has any opinions, experiences or suggestions, I would be extremely grateful for any input.

Best wishes,
Neil