Hi Aaron,
Very interesting... but I am affraid that it will be hard to *simply* move your entire Application to Win2K.
You have no source code. When you want to move your Progress App to a different platform (such as Win2K) you will need to:
- Either convert your database to that platform (easiest is to do a complete dump and load) - this so you can have your db on the Win2K server as well - or use Client/Server so you can keep your database on the UNIX box and run the app on Windows clients
- Recompile your Application on Win2K agains that database (for which you need source code - or encrypted source code)
- Probably make changes to your Application, this can range to just a simple few changes to quite a lot. This because your Application is most probably designed to run in a Character (TTY) environment and Windows is, as is to be expected, very different (for instance printing, but also Screen Handling etc etc etc). And of course for this you need source code.
- You have to obtain Progress licenses for the Win2K platform. This means a platform change, which may not be cheap (depends on what kind of licenses you have now, best to contact your local Progress office for more information)
Depending on the Progress version you are running now you may encounter some more problems/hurdles. If your Application is still running an old version of Progress (say a 5 year old one), you may need to make more changes to your code because Progress has changed quite a bit over the past years. Progress *does* have a so-called "keyword forget list" that you can use to disable new features when an old app uses words or variables that are now part of the Progress language, but that does not always solve your problem.
All in all, it will be quite a job to do what you want to do. Maybe it is an idea to, instead of going down a road of which you do not know where it ends to just
- Go to some UNIX/Solaris courses
- Go to some Progress courses (for instance DB Administration)
That way you will be able to learn more about your system and you will probably be able to perform at least some of the things your supplier is charging you money for.
Disassembling your database and reconstucting it in Access is - as far as I am concerned - not a viable option. The Progress database is far better than Access and, especially when you get a bit of load on the system, outperforms it with ease.
Going to Oracle... well... if you really really want to, why not, but it will cost quite a few dollars to do that too (and will involve a lot of work). Although you probably don't know much about Progress at the moment, after some training and playing around with it you will probably find out that Progress is far easier to use and the Progress 4GL is very strong indead.
Depending on the Progress version you use (it is certainly worth finding out) you can use Progress' WebSpeed to create web pages that access the database. WebSpeed allows you to do "web programming" using the Progress 4GL. If that's no option, you can always try to access your Progress database over ODBC and use ASP or something like that to create your web pages (is slower that WebSpeed though). Progress does support ODBC on the database, however I am not sure what the earliest version is with ODBC support. The only trick is that, because Progress rewrote the entire database engine for version 9, ODBC access is different (different ODBC drivers and different on the database server side as well) in the later Progress versions (version 9.x) compared to the earlier versions (8.x and before).
Anyway, lots of things to think or talk about...
