Re: Lack of support for logical variables

Hi Michael,

I don't understand why you're asking these questions. If you're migrating a Progress application to Oracle then you use Progress's Oracle Dataserver utilities to produce an Oracle schema and a schema holder database from your Progress schema. The fact that Oracle doesn't have logical variables and arrays (in the sense that you and I, as Progress people, understand them) isn't an issue. The Dataserver will take a Progress array named mycol[10] and it will create individual columns named mycol##1, mycol##2 etc in the Oracle DB. Likewise, your logical columns will be migrated to number columns where your logical values are stored as 0s and 1s.

The whole idea of Progress's Oracle Dataserver is that it allows Progress 4GL code to run against an Oracle database with little or no modification. The Dataserver handles the differences between Progress datatypes and Oracle datatypes; you don't have to stop using arrays and logical variables just because Oracle implements them differently than Progress. The theory is that your code will compile and run without modification... but it's just a theory. From my experience, the biggest issues you will face in the migration are:

1. Data that is longer than its display format. In Progress, you can store 400 chars of data in an x(8) column because x(8) is only a display mask. Not so in Oracle: 8 really means 8 and it won't let you store anything longer in that column if that's what you've defined.
2. Transaction behaviour. When a Progress 4GL program creates a record, it can "see" that record straight away. Not so when you run a Progress program on Oracle; you'll have to whizz round your whole application, adding VALIDATE statements after all your key columns have been assigned, to force a database write.

There are others, and they're all well documented. Good luck!

Cheers,
Tarby Received on Tue Jan 31 2006 - 05:14:16 CST