Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!bloom-picayune.mit.edu!athena.mit.edu!mlbarrow From: mlbarrow@athena.mit.edu (Michael L Barrow) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.apps Subject: Re: 4th Dimension & Networking over the phone Message-ID: Date: 12 Dec 90 02:07:26 GMT References: <1CE00001.i42wj1@tbomb.ice.com> <10599@uhccux.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu> Sender: news@athena.mit.edu (News system) Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lines: 40 In-Reply-To: francis@wolfman.cis.ohio-state.edu's message of 11 Dec 90 15:51:52 GMT In article francis@wolfman.cis.ohio-state.edu (RD Francis) writes: In article <10599@uhccux.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu> bmartin@uhccux.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Brian Martin) writes: In a client/server design, the client program you are running on your mac submits request to a data server. The data server runs on another computer, and carriers out all requests submitted by all clients. The result of the request is then transmitted back to the client. The client never directly accesses the data file. In a file server approach, which is the model that 4D uses, there are no clients. Each mac has its own copy of 4D. Each copy of 4D "shares" its data file with other copies of 4D on the network. And each copy of 4D actually performs the query/insert/delete operations that would have been performed by the single data server described above. Sounds silly, but that's how 4D works. To risk belaboring the obvious here, that's how all of the Mac databases work, with the probable exception of Oracle. Also, this is how all file servers that I know of work, regardless of whether they're being used with a database or not. Just trying to avoid confusion. -- R David Francis francis@cis.ohio-state.edu Actually, FileMaker (if you classify this program as a database :-) ), uses the client/server approach. That is, each client makes requests of a single machine, which actually reads/writes to the file. I think this topic is _way_ belabored, so I'll shut up now. -- Mike -- --Michael L Barrow mlbarrow@mit.edu o MIT Information Systems/Information Services MCR Consultant o Project Athena Volunteer User Consultant o Member, Student Information Processing Board (SIPB) o Oh, yeah.....I'm a student too! (MIT '93)