Thank you all for contributing to such an interesting topic!
I am sorry I left you all debating by yourselves - but due to a technical glitch ProgressTalk temporarily locked me out and I couldn't post! (Thanks Tom for helping to fix it.)
The licencing costs were mentioned a few times. I agree that it is a little frustrating that Progress details are not "publically" available - where those for Oracle and Microsoft are. But - as Tom pointed-out: "
[FONT="]Don't forget that Oracle gives a 20% discount for being able to fog a mirror, a 30% discount for having a pulse and 50% for a purchase order.[/FONT]" I happen to know of one customer where Oracle gave an 85% discount! Which means, as Thomas pointed-out, "
... [FONT="]any published price list is pretty meaningless[/FONT]".
Of course I expected a fair amount of "religious" propaganda (and wasn't disappointed). That, too, is interesting. In one way or another it tends to flush-out some valuable points.
Tom says he likes the Progress:
FOR EACH customer:
DISPLAY customer.
END.
style of "English-like" syntax ... and so do I! Over a lot of years I have worked with many languages (even a lot of assembler) and find some languages "click" with me - and other don't. Progress 4GL "clicks" - C-ish languages don't. But that doesn't matter to me in the current context. I don't anticipate cutting code - I'll hire others to do that.
I didn't mention (sorry!) that whereas in most countries Progress is a "small" community - that point is very much magnified here in Indonesia. There are some especially good 4GL developers, but only very few. On the other hand there are "vast" numbers of developers trained in development using Microsoft tools. From my experience, however, the considerable majority do not have the kind of experience needed. They tend to be poorly trained to understand indexes properly - or transaction scoping - or locking strategies. If I advertise for "VB.NET developers" it is likely that I will get many hundreds of applications - and then there needs to be a meticulous and lengthy process of discovering exactly what capability each one has. (But that's what I have to do!)
I still have a week or two before I have to make a decision on the development environment.
From what I've received so far ....
- I feel that a mixed Progress/MS environment is not the right way to go.
- A MS environment is looking like what may be the decision.
That is not necessarily what I would "like" (!) - but considering all the practicalities involved, I feel that may be the "best" option for me to adopt.
Two points concerning SQL Server that I am wondering about:
- Can I extract statistics from a database that are similar to the statistics available from Progress' VSTs?
- No-where anywhere in SQL Server documentation that I have looked at is there a mention of dumping/reloading a database. I am told it is "unnecessary" - because one can do like a table move which has a similar result. Is that correct?
Ron.