dunlop@wateol.UWaterloo.CA (06/27/91)
I am interested in finding out about using DAL, which is now included with System 7.0. I have read the article in MacUser Jan 91 and I have Inside Mac VI which describes DAM. I also have the APDA catalogue which lists the products that Apple sells, such as DAL Servers and Adapters. Having said that as an intro, what I need is good technical advice about developing an application on the Mac which would be a custom interface to a DBMS residing on a Sparcstation. APDALog lists only MVS/TSO, VM/CMS and VAX/VMS servers. However, the MacUser claims that servers and adapters for Unix boxes will be available RSN. Does anyone have specific knowledge of when RSN is? The choice of server is not optional. Also the MacUser article claims that DAL is slooowww, compared with SQL*Net or SequelLink. They didn't include in their comparison Informix's solution using Informix I-Net with DataLink. Given that: 1/ Must use a Sparcstation for the DBMS 2/ Must use TCP/IP network protocol 3/ Must have a custom interface written in C 4/ Will be accessing imagery data (multi-megabytes) 4/ I Would very much *like* to use DAL Does anyone have any insights or experience that could be helpful. Since the DB accesses will be quite interactive, performance will be an important issue. Perhaps since we will only be using a single DBMS from multiple Macs then some of the other DBMSs would be more appropriate. Any and all help will be appreciated. A good contact within the DAL developers group would be good too ;-). Thanks for your time. -- Doug Dunlop Earth Observations Lab / ISTS, University of Waterloo email: dunlop@wateol.UWaterloo.CA