fileProODBC (was Re: OT: Filemaker 8)

[Bill Campbell]

On Mon, Feb 06, 2006, Tyler Style wrote:
>Kenneth Brody wrote:
><snip>
> > Hey!  How come I can't use Opera or Firefox as an http server?
>>
>>And how come I can't browse the web with Apache?
>>
>>Inquiring minds want to know.  :-)
>>
>>--
>>KenBrody at BestWeb dot net        spamtrap: <g8ymh8uf001 at sneakemail.com>
>
>Easily answered, grasshopper.  Because a web browser, unlike a database 
>backend, is a client.  And Apache, unlike an end user application, is a 
>server.  Can filePro be said to be a database server?  Yup, I think most 
>people would say so, given that most people use it for data storage and 
>manipulation.  After all, there's even a limited SQL interface that can 
>be tacked on to query it, which kinda says 'database' to me (although 
>again it's a read only thing, alas).
>
>Hm.  Walks like a duck.  Quacks like a duck.
>
>So, not really unreasonable for a developer to expect ODBC from 
>something that bills itself as a database server (plus a rapid 
>applications development suite and reporting tool).  In fact, isn't that 
>also a fair description of MS Access?  Except, of course, MS Access 
>offers ODBC...

Access is also infamous for eating data in a manner that's
unrecoverable (at least the versions built on the ``jet''
database engines have been).

The worst data recovery problems I've ever had to fix with
FilePro were on a Radio Shack Model 16 running Xenix where hard
disk errors would shift the data a byte or to at random intervals
in the files.  Most of the data was recoverable by going through
the file a record at a time in dclerk, noting the record where
the display fields showed the shift, then using a C program that
would read up to that point, the do an appropriate lseek() to
compensate for the data offset.

Bill
--
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