ericf@montreux (Eric Feigenson) (03/15/90)
Hi! I am looking at various RDBMS and have come across mention of a product called "Progress" (which is also the name of the company, I believe). I understand that it's multi-platform and runs under Unix and DOS (at least). Has anyone had any experience actually *using* this system? Is it any good? Is it easy to use? How big of an application can it handle? Is the language sane and/or rational to use (please... no COBOL!)? Any and all experience/information/rumors would be appreciated! Thanks! -Eric ericf@zurich.ai.mit.edu (and probably mit-zurich!ericf, but don't quote me)
neal@mnopltd.UUCP (03/18/90)
->Hi! I am looking at various RDBMS and have come across mention of a product
->called "Progress" (which is also the name of the company, I believe). I
->understand that it's multi-platform and runs under Unix and DOS (at least).
->Has anyone had any experience actually *using* this system? Is it any good?
->Is it easy to use? How big of an application can it handle? Is the language
->sane and/or rational to use (please... no COBOL!)?
Yeah, I have written various financial systems in Progress off and on over the
last 5 years. Other experience: C, Informix, Btrieve, etc. I think it is a
great system for applications. It is portable; (DOS/Unix/BTOS/CTOS/VMS..and
soon AS/400 arrg!...) It provides a strong procedural language which is fairly
straight forward to use. It gives you transaction scoping and automatic
backout, which is REALLY handy for financial systems. It has a real strong
data dictionary, allowing relation integrity checks to be specified there i
instead of in code. Please be more specific about HOW BIG... I wrote a
complete General Ledger (30 modules), my wife wrote a time accounting and billing
system for law firms; we never found a size restriction. Now I will note that
the indexing is all garden variety B+ tree stuff. So on REAL big databases
you will run into the standard unix indirect I-node nonsense. It does not
have a raw-partition capability like Unify.
But I think it is ok.. gimme a poke if ya want to know more...
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Neal Rhodes MNOP Ltd (404)- 972-5430
President Lilburn (atlanta) GA 30247 Fax: 978-4741
uunet!emory!jdyx!mnopltd!neal Or uunet!gatech!stiatl!mnopltd!neal
------------------------------------------------------------------------------jr@oglvee.UUCP (Jim Rosenberg) (03/20/90)
ericf@montreux (Eric Feigenson) writes: >Hi! I am looking at various RDBMS and have come across mention of a product >called "Progress" (which is also the name of the company, I believe). [...] >Has anyone had any experience actually *using* this system? Is it any good? >Is it easy to use? How big of an application can it handle? Is the language >sane and/or rational to use (please... no COBOL!)? We've been using Progress for our MIS work and are quite pleased. As far as how "rational and sane" the language is, it's TERRIFIC. It's fully block structured, no goto statement, and all kinds of neat things are scoped to blocks. For instance there's an undo statement to roll back transactions; undo is also a *control flow statement*: you undo a block. It's the best DBMS language I've seen from a standpoint of readability of the code. As to application size, there's a fly in the ointment here. Code is portable among DOS, VMS, most UNIX platforms -- supposedly even AS400! -- but on Intel architecture machines there's a limit of 64K on the size of a compiled procedure. This is a very big pain in a tender place. You can usually figure out a way to break up an application into small enough pieces, but occasionally it causes real problems. I wrote a an automated system that sends database information over UUCP and validates transactions at each end -- almost entirely in Progress. That should tell you something about the power and flexibility of the language. -- Jim Rosenberg pitt Oglevee Computer Systems >--!amanue!oglvee!jr 151 Oglevee Lane cgh Connellsville, PA 15425 #include <disclaimer.h>