Re: Evaluation of DBMS Application Development

In article 3n7_at_news.cis.umn.edu, westrich_at_bingo.ncc.umn.edu () writes:
->I've heard that Powerbuilder (PB) provides a
->very broad and easy to use development environment, but that it isn't
->flexible enough to handle complex SQL queries, and requires special
->table setup on the server (how much trouble is this?). I've also heard
->criticism of PB's report writer, though I'm not sure if this refers to
->their most recent version. My initial impression of JAM and Visual
->Basic is that both are "lower level" than PB, thus one ends up writing
->(amd maintaining) more code for a given application. To a lesser
->extent, I saw this same critique leveled against SQLWindows in an
->InfoWorld review in January 92 that compared SQLWindows to PB. I
->should stress that the type of work we do is by no means routine
->database application work, so there are concerns that a tool like PB
->might not be sufficiently flexible.

Brian:

One of the biggest touted advantages of PowerBuilder is also one of its biggest drawbacks. PB is designed to work with "any" relational database, so that you can port your front end applications to new back-end servers very easily.

The price of this flexibility is that sometimes there's a special feature of one RDBMS that you'd like to take advantage of that PB (and similar tools) will not easily support.

From what I've seen (my disclaimer: "I'm a DBA, not a programmer, dammit!", so take it for what it's worth), it's not that difficult to make use of non-vanilla features of your DBMS, but doing so will require a bit more work. If you're looking for PB to almost write your applications for you, and you've scheduled ridiculously short development times because of this, you may find that having to write 20 lines of code instead of taking the default settings on a window a costly trade-off.

Most experienced programmers would not find the extra effort involved in using Sybase stored procedures (for example) a big deal, but it's a project scheduling consideration you should think through up front.

:m

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Michele Sherry			| Currently: michele_at_mtkgc.com
KaleidaTech Associates, Inc.	| Client:    Sakura Global Capital
Huntington Station, NY  11746	| Email:     mskta_at_panix.com
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