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Q. Which products (VB custom controls) could help me access databases like Oracle, DB2, Sybase, etc. from any AS400 server as well as a Unix server.

They have to be transparent to the user, fast, and non ODBC based.

Thanks.

From: Juan H. Gómez
Email: gerson@tricom.net

A. Juan, what you are asking is for a list of available proprietary connectivity solutions for almost anything. Unfortunately I just cannot give you a complete answer. I'm sure there are a number of products out there to do this sort of thing, I would suggest that they will largely exist as DLLs or C libraries (which you may have to compile into a DLL so that you could call it from VB). Most database vendors will provide some form of basic connectivity library with their database products. Again, to target cross platform this will likely be a C library or libraries.

Unfortunately such libraries are not all that common due to the rise of ODBC in recent years. Because ODBC, is flexible, has drivers for everything, reasonably easy to use, transportable and reasonably fast the development of competing products is largely restricted to vendor's own libraries. I would be looking closely at the product documentation of the databases you wish to connect to and search the internet for such tools. In particular you may wish to look out for a library called DbLib which is supported by MS SQL Server and Sybase SQL Server. There are a number of tools available that use DBLib to connect to databases, however I don't know how many back ends support it.

If you really want to hit a range of database back ends from VB apps then I would suggest you use ODBC. Use RDO in VB4 or code directly to the ODBC API if you like. Using a range of custom connection solutions is going to be a maintenance nightmare.

Sorry I couldn't give you any more tangible help.

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