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From: francois@welch.jhu.edu (Francois Schiettecatte)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Emerald Bay and surfaces
Message-ID: <1990Apr7.210850.4337@welch.jhu.edu>
Date: 7 Apr 90 21:08:50 GMT
Organization: Welch Medical Library, Baltimore Md.
Lines: 60


Hal Smith writes below
----------------

>From: Hal Smith at Sound Advice, NorthAmerinet & CRS USENET Gateway

Jeroen Schipper jschippe@praxis.cs.ruu.nl writes

JS}I'm still waiting for a compiler to make .EXE files from dBase IV
JS}or FoxPro .PRG files (PC). Ashton Tate promised it a long time ago,
JS}but I still haven't heard anything. Is there someone who could give
JS}me some information about when, where and who.

Jeroen,
  Take a serious look at Vulcan 2 and Emerald Bay from Ratliff
Software Productions, Inc. Good distributed data base engine with
surfaces (Vulcan is dbase like) to talk to the engine. Vulcan also
produces .EXE file.
  All the neat stuff like transaction commit/abort, logging,
permissions down to the field level, locking, and so forth are in
there. They also have a good database administration function, report
writer and file translation package. Data typing is much more robust
than Fox or Clipper. Initial indexing at when you import the dataset
is not as fast as Fox, maybe not as fast as Clipper, but I have not
had a corrupted index, (yet, knock on wood).
  Also has C, Pascal and Lotus surfaces, and forms design utility.
Good stuff.

-Hal
---
 ~ EZ 1.27 #113 ~ Wanted: FoxPro Surface for Emerald Bay!
 ~ QNet 2.04: NorthAmeriNet: Sound Advice BBS ~ Gladstone ~ MO

------------------------------

My answer:

Hal,

When I was working for Migent in the UK, I worked on a Clipper surface for 
Emerald bay. Actually Clipper has a very nice extend system which allows
the inclusion of C libraries really easily ( it took me about 2 weeks to
produce the interface, about 3000 lines of C code, including doc ). I then
looked into doing the same thing for Fox, but at the time they did not
support easy C interfacing ( maybe now things are not the same but I 
just dont know ).  The interface itself consists of a bunch of functions
under Clipper which pass and return parameteres to various emerald
bay C library calls. ( here I plug EB a bit ) I found that Emerald
bay was a very nice system to work with and I also found ( doing
bench marks for Migent ) that the Emerald bay database engine was faster
that the Clipper engine ( except for inserts ). I would be willing to 
pass on this library ( plus source - it's built for Microsoft C but 
conversion over to Turbo C should not be difficult - after all C is
portable, right ? ) if there is some interest. I will not be able to 
get my hands on it for about 3 weeks, so you will have to wait for 
a while. I think that Jordan Brown had a look at it after I passed it
onto migent, but I'm not sure ( I know he had a look at a competing
product which never made it - from planet software I think ).

Francois