[NHCOLL-L:140] RE: Input wanted from users of Visual FoxPro dbs

[Paduan, Jenny]

Our systems support person observed that Microsoft appears to be putting
their resources toward Access instead of FoxPro products. He fears FoxPro
may be headed for extinction.

I recommend MS Access because it is so easy to use and administer and there
are lots of "how-to" books and courses offered. However, MS Access runs on
PC/NT machines, not Macs or UNIX. Also there is a limit to the size of
files, as was mentioned, but that size limit is rather large. While MS SQL
Server, Oracle, or Sybase are more powerful database engines, they require a
lot more administrative expertise. 

We prototyped our specimen database in Microsoft Access and then migrated it
to Microsoft SQL Server. For our web connection, we developed queries with
MS Active Server Pages (ASP) and Microsoft FrontPage. We continue to use MS
Access as a user-friendly front end to SQL Server: data entry, uncommon
queries, and labels are done with Access satellite databases whose
underlying tables are linked over the network to the master SQL Server
database. 

Jenny

Jennifer B. Paduan, MBARI
7700 Sandholdt Road, PO Box 628
Moss Landing, CA 95039
phone: 831-775-1729  fax: 831-775-1620
web: http://www.mbari.org/~paje