On Sat, 16 Oct 1999, Gary Rathbone wrote:
>
> I'd like to use Metacard as as Front-End and Analysis Tool for ODBC compliant
>databases.
>
> Has anyone else any experience of this ?
Experience with this among MetaCard users is pretty scarce as far as I
know.
> Is there a suitable external ?
> If not is anyone interested in writing one ? (obviously for payment)
There isn't such an external AFAIK. There is one for use with Oracle,
and several customers have built externals for use with other RDBMSs
(Sybase and Empress I know about, probably others exist that I don't
know about. Alas, none of these have been released outside the
organizations that produced them). Writing an ODBC external for
MetaCard could either be pretty straightforward or very time
consuming, depending mostly on how complete the coverage of the ODBC
API needs to be and the number of databases it had to work with.
Another possibility is to use the socket support in 2.3 to do this.
This'd be a lot better than using an external because it would work
cross platform. And cross-platform ODBC library support is something
that this industry has been struggling with for years and hasn't
really solved. This is mostly the result of poor standards compliance
among the database vendors, but incompatibilities among OSs and even
OS versions also play a role. The result is that ODBC is a
maintenance and technical support nightmare, which are the primary
reasons why MetaCard doesn't have any support for it built in.
The few products that come close have all been very expensive and
support has been iffy as product lines get discontinued and sold off
to other companies. The leader in ODBC drivers used to be Intersolv,
which was merged with another company to form Merant awhile back. I
haven't heard much about them since then, but you can take a look at
the products at:
http://www.merant.com/datadirect/products/odbc/Connect/overview.asp
> Am I totally off track and should look at another solution ?
If you're only concerned with one database, you should probably use an
external specialized for use with that database. If you only need to
use Windows, using ODBC with a Windows-only development tool (like
Visual Basic) would be easier than getting a MetaCard external
working. Otherwise, I recommend pursuing the possibility of building
something with ODBC in MetaCard, either as an external or using the
new socket support in 2.3.
Regards,
Scott
> TIA
>
> Gary Rathbone
> Director
> Hooknet
********************************************************
Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com
MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that...
