Excuse the cross-posting but....

I am not quite sure what group to post this on. Anyway maybe someone could help me out, or send me a "pitch".

I am constructing a set of programs that must all access the same set of data. These are Windows 3.1 and Windows NT apps, and can be on the same machine or on separate machines on a network. This is for a multi-line BBS system that will be a commercial product.

I need some kind of database soultion, obviously, but, I am not overly experienced with databases, and don't really know what is "out there" as far as data "servers" or engines.

I need for the different programs ("nodes" of the BBS, as well as maintenance utilities) to be able to access data such as user records, mail and news indices, etc. I need to be able to 'lock' records for single writer / multiple reader, or exclusive. I also need the ability to have these programs be able to create new "tables" in the database, "on the fly", meaning, without having to lock all other programs out of the database for any but a trivial amount of time (a few seconds), and without having to manually disconnect these other programs from the database. Searches of the database would be much less frequent than simple table look-ups and updates, which would have to be done quickly.

Now, I am not sure if this is better done by some kind of database "engine" libraries, which are contained in each program, and which all act on a shared network database file (or group of files), or whether I should construct some kind of "data server" which would respond to queries through DDE or a network (socket) connection and facilitate the kind of functionality I want. Perhaps I could find a program that would act as such a data server, without any modification, or I could use some commercial libraries to build it myself?

In any case, it would have to be a royalty-free situation, so I can see that software code libraries would be better than a actual complete data server.

In the case of code libraries, I would need to be able to interface with Borland C++ and OWL 2.0 easily. I don't know much about object-oriented databases, maybe I should look into it?

Also, the ability to allow me to use NT multithreading to respond to multiple queries/updates asynchronously would be excellent.

Maybe someone has some clues, help, sales pitches, as to commercial, shareware or freeware solutions to this particular problem? I would love to hear them.

I will try to read the newsgroups I posted this to, but would appreciate e-mail as well. Also, since I am not sure which newsgroup this thread would go into, maybe someone could give me a "boot to the head" on that as well?

Thanks for your time. Received on Tue Sep 20 1994 - 07:02:36 CEST