UpgradingForms3.0 -> Forms4.5 character mode catch 22 in VMS

To cut a long story short, we can't verify the conversion projects menus until we upgrade the operating system and database. If we upgrade the OS and RDBMS, we can't run existing production Forms 3.0 apps. This is what Oracle calls "continuing to support character-mode customers".

Oracle told us a while ago that a bug in the OpenVMS character-mode runtime - ie full-screen menus don't work - would not be fixed till the next release (1.1) of the toolset on OpenVMS.

We have six production RDBMS V7.1.5 databases running on VMS 6.2. The next release for this platform is V7.3 which is only certified for VMS 7.0/7.1.

Oracle WWCS told us yesterday that Dev/2000 V1.1 for OpenVMS would only run against RDBMS V7.3.

Forms V3 will not run against V7.3 (unless you run forms against remote databases & SQL*Net to production instances, an unsupported workaround!)

We have a cluster of two Alphas one of which has the development database and one production database. We could move the latter to the other machine, but I doubt we could upgrade one machine to OpenVMS 7.1 and continue with 6.2 on the other!

Cheers,

John Thomas
Development Manager
MAT Transport Ltd
http://www.toronto.demon.co.uk/john
Views expressed are not the views of my company. Received on Sat Feb 08 1997 - 00:00:00 CET