dlucy@tropez.UUCP (Doug Lucy) (04/12/90)
> > I have seen references to a product called PROGRESS in > > Is it a 4GL? Does it include a DBMS of some kind? Will > > it use my ORACLE DBMS without a lot of tinkering? Is it > > any good? > > > Yes Progress is sophisticated 4GL... a real strong > procedural language... We do mostly Progress work here. It's a 4GL piled ontop of a crash-tolerant database. The language is transaction based and fairly complete. It is billed as an application development system (read you have to turn the automatic labels and windows off if you want anything other than their non-programmer code generation). The database format is proprietary and Progress Software Corp is very unhappy about ever letting on to the internal structure. The database itself provides automatic before- imaging to prevent damage if a crash occurs during a db transaction. There is an optional after-imaging which provides a means of protecting against hardware crash (second copy of just the changes made + last night's backup = perfect database). The good things about Progress: source-code portable to Unix, DOS, DOS LAN, VMS, CTOS users can write reports and use SQL has hooks (not great) for accessing external routines The bad things: even compiled Pogress is a stack-machine interpreted lang it's really hard to keep it running in a VMS evironment due to lack of doc for setting all the VMS protections data dictionary cannot be changed after compiling the source code (at the client's site) If you've any other questions, please drop me email. PROGRESS Software 5 Oak Park Bedford, MA 01730 617.275.4500 -- "It's such a fine line between stupid..." | Doug Lucy 703.820.3922 "...and stupid." | DC Pro, Falls Church, VA "Yeah, stupid." | uunet!tropez!dlucy