Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!cs.utexas.edu!ut-emx!xdaa374 From: xdaa374@ut-emx.UUCP (William T. Douglass) Newsgroups: comp.databases Subject: Re: Multi-User on Appleshare? Message-ID: <15540@ut-emx.UUCP> Date: 21 Jul 89 02:11:32 GMT References: Reply-To: xdaa374@emx.UUCP (Bill Douglass) Organization: UTexas Computation Center, Austin, Texas Lines: 41 In article (David Bruce Pinkus) writes: > I'll be working on a multi-user database soon (probably FoxBase 2.0 - >Multi-User) Good choice. > on Macs Another good choice :-) > and I was curious as to how data file integrity was >taken care of. I want to be able to modify a database, but I don't want >any of the datafiles to be accessable from the Finder (with appleshare). Well, we have arrived at a partial work-around to this. The trick lies in using XCMDs (a la HyperCard) to do the dirty work from inside a FoxBase program. The Apple Cheap Chooser (posted a few months ago on the net) contains XCMDs to let you mount & unmount an AppleShare volume from a simple subroutine call. We took this capability & designed our code so the database program supplied a volume password, the user was required to input a user-id & password, and the combination of the 3 mounts the file server before accessing any data files. The program unmounts the server before quiting. We still don't have error trapping done, so a bomb exposes the files erver on the user's desktop. Also, a user w/ multi-finder can simply switch out of FoxBase to access the fileserver. (I said it was a partial solution.) FoxBase does not allow opening indexes on read-only volumes. Also, indexed access is slower than I woull like under multi-user code, but acceptable. They have significantly sped up the multi-user stuff from 1.1. The ideal would be an SQL interface from FoxBase to an SQL server (like Oracle.) I think Alexis Rosen was following up on this: any comments, Alexis? For now, though, FoxBase+/Mac 2.0 is my best recommendation to you. Good luck. -- Bill Douglass, TCADA "I dreamed I was to take a test, in a Dairy Queen, on another planet." L. Anderson