Wang VS with PACE database -- UNIX and Novell migration

[Paul Gillingwater]

Hi people. What interesting challenges they come up with at work
sometimes! We have a Wang VS (around 200 users) accessed via a mixture
of LightSpeed gateways and WLOC cards. We're wanting to migrate away
from the PACE relational database towards Sybase on a UNIX platform, but
want to do a gradual transition, maintaining access to data on both
systems in a hopefully transparent manner.

I believe Wang's Open PACE is a newer version which supports SQl, and
may make the task of maintaining referential integrity easier, but this
is apparently too expensive, and the costs of migrating to Open PACE/SQL
would probably be as much as going to Sybase. (We're redesigning our
front-ends too, and taking COBOL functionality into 4GLs.)

I understand it is possible to obtain TCP/IP and a C compiler for the
Wang VS, but I don't know what functionality this will give us. Do we
get a Sockets library with this? And is there any slight chance that we
could interface to a PACE library to read, write and modify rows or
columns in the PACE database via the LAN?

Another option is to use PACEMAN, which runs on a PC -- but from the
docs. I've read, it doesn't seem to offer an open API, or even access to
DDE under Windows, which might have helped.

I would appreciate hearing from anyone who has done, or is doing, a
similar migration from PACE on Wang VS towards Sybase on UN!X.

Best wishes for the solstices (winter and summer!),

Paul Gillingwater
--
Paul Gillingwater
Home system: pa...@actrix.co.at (Waffle)