🚀 go-pugleaf

Sorry to be so late responding to this.  I've been trying to get my papers
done for the conference!

> 1.  Is it intended as a lowest-common-denominator SQL database?  That is,
> could an Interbase table be read by any/most other RDBMS?

No, rather it is a desktop implementation of the "full" Interbase server
product.

> 2.  What do you mean by "a model of key tables"?  Just the structure, or, a
> subset of a database _small_ enough to brought into the development
> environment?

The latter.  The data pump worked well for creating desktop versions of the
required tables.

> > Multi-member tables were another story, but they're problematic for
> > ODBC anyway, so I already had logical files (akin to SQL views) set up on the
> > AS/400 for those situations.
> >
> --------------------------
> Could you comment a bit more on this 'problem'?

Under the native AS/400 database, each database file can contain multiple sets
of records, each uniquely addressable and called a "member" of the file.  For
example, we track customer data for two distinct product lines, motorcycles
and automobiles.  So each of the tables in our buyer database cintains two
members, one called "AUTO" and the other called "MC".  Some of our tables have
10 or even more members depending on the need.

You can create logical views of these tables that exspose only a specific
member, all members, or what have you.  So while the physical file BYR01PF,
for example, has both AUTO and MC members, we create a corresponding logical
file called BYR01MC which is built to access the MC member only.

The problem with the various AS/400 ODBC drivers I've used is that they only
"see" the first or default member of a given table (in our case, AUTO, since
they're exposed alphabetically).  So if I want to get to the MC member data of
a given from a dBASE app, I have to have previously created a logical view as
described above for that file.

It's a pain, but not terribly hard to work around.  The Delphi/400 and C++
Builder/400 products incorporate native AS/400 support that allows you to
address member issues directly from your client-side application, but then of
course we'd have to write everything in Delphi or C++B, which I'm reticent to
do. :)

kgc