Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!think!mintaka!ogicse!decwrl!shelby!portia!jessica!duggie From: duggie@jessica.Stanford.EDU (Doug Felt) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: Sybase on the NeXT Message-ID: <9453@portia.Stanford.EDU> Date: 22 Feb 90 23:14:46 GMT References: <4223@cayman.COM> Sender: USENET News System Reply-To: duggie@jessica.Stanford.EDU (Doug Felt) Organization: Stanford University Lines: 65 In article <4223@cayman.COM> chris@cayman.COM (Chris North) writes: > I was about to create a simply database using 4D on the mac when our new >NeXT arrived and I noticed that it has Sybase on it. Has anyone used Sybase >on the NeXT? Is it reliable? Is there any sample code other there other >than what NeXT puts on the machine? Recently I've been looking at 4D, Oracle for Macintosh, and Sybase on the NeXT for a simple but good-sized (30K records, 100K subrecords) database. I have only about 4 weeks worth of experience with the Mac databases combined, and about the same with Sybase, so I'm a relative novice. I don't like 4D. The documentation (once you get past the startup manual) is poor, the program has bugs, the layout editor is a pain to use, and the user interface has glitches and lacks features. The language is interpreted (currently) and thus slow, however the database itself is faster than the other two for the kind of searches I need to do. Although you can call your own code from 4D and, I presume, get around some of the problems, this is not documented in the manuals you get from Acius. There is apparently some activity on Compuserve, but I don't have access... Oracle for Macintosh might be ok, but again the documentation has problems. In this case there seems to be no 'administrative guide' to tell you about the system tables, space management, backups and so on. The documentation on calling Oracle from Hypercard, or from your own code, seems complete but I haven't really explored it. My problem with Oracle was that the speed seems too slow for my kind of searches. I also had problems dropping indexes and recovering from glitches, and the loader program crashed a few times. Sybase has, in contrast, been very easy to use. Here my problem has been not lack of documentation, but that some of it doesn't print out properly. Also there is a lot of it. The demo programs have been a big help and showed me pretty much all I needed to get started-- there are a few conflicts with Objective-C include files, but otherwise I have had no trouble calling Sybase from Appkit programs. The loader program supplied with Sybase is also *much* faster-- I loaded my test database in about ten minutes, whereas each of the other databases took over ten hours. Occasionally I have wedged myself by running out of space, but enough searching through the manuals has always turned up a solution. I don't know much about maintenance issues, not having dealt with that yet, but suspect Sybase will be far and away the easiest in terms of backup and recovery from failures. 4D, for example, was unable to read a record (media failure, I suspect) and prompted me to delete it-- but left the index for that record, so I was stuck with a glitched index. I also had problems with Oracle as I mentioned. Sybase hasn't given me any problems yet, but I doubt they'd be any worse. I am not planning on providing multiuser access so have nothing to say in this regard. I seem to remember a previous posting mentioning limitations on the 'free' Sybase bundled with the NeXT, but I don't know for sure. I can't imagine the Mac would be any better, though. I'd also like to know who else has used Sybase and what kind of experience they've had with it. I need to make a decision fairly soon and would like to go for the NeXT despite the lack of a color screen. How has Sybase performed under real use? Doug Felt Courseware Authoring Tools Project Stanford University