Hello everbody !

Hard decision !?

We have an client/server application with the following attributes:
Windows Clients
Hewlett-Packard HP-3000 Data Server(MPE 7.0) with an Image-3000 Database engine and a third party indexing tool (Omnidex)
Development tool = Visual Basic Clone , good multi user development features, good features to connect to the HP-3000
and work with the databases, poor functionality (1/3 of visual basic)
We have more than 1000 forms,prgs,reports compiled into one exe file. In our development tool we have no seperation between buisiness logic and data logic.
We use about 10 databases with all together about 250 tables
The five biggest tables contain 2-4 million records
We normaly have about 300 concurrently online-users from 90 locations, in business maintime (first6-8 days of month) there
are 400 concurrently online-users inserting,deleting and updating mainly 1 table (wage data for more then 50000 people)
To keep the data traffic away from our WAN, we use a central Windows-Terminal-Server Farm (+ Citrix) and windows terminals
in our locations.

The combination (Server + Database+Omnidex) is very robust and fast (not unexpected downtime for the server or the databases)!
The combination server and development suite is very expensive!

Uuuupppsss !!!
Hewlett-Packard will stop developing and supporting the HP-3000 series in 2006! We have to change the database and the server!

In the past we did some smaller applications with Visual Foxpro (up to 20 concurrent users, native foxpro dbf, maximum 400000 records in the biggest table), We love the power of the fox. Now we are thinking about changing to Visual Foxpro.

Is there a realy opportunity to do this with native foxpro dbf's ??
Do we have to go to Oracle or SQL-Server (no realy experiences until now) ??
Is My-SQL a possible alternative (Costs are allways an important aspect) ??
Has anyone done an project like this with foxpro ??
Are there known problems with foxpro on a terminal-server-farm ??
What about performance ?? How to test 300-400 online users ??


Any opinion or experiences welcomed.

Best regards
Albert