I have recently had my company invest in a number of relational database solutions for a new project we are undertaking and have convinced many of them that a solution using Linux is a good one since many of the web and internet tools (apache, samba) are freely available. Now for the part that is interesting. We decided to develop a rather large asset management database that would support many different accounts we have and be available from a central LAN access point. Several databases were initially studied including Approach, Access, etc. I introduced people to ADABAS D as a reference point. Unfortunately, we have decided to implement after testing a solution using empress for linux for a number of reasons. The empress toolkiit includes quite nice motif tools for building, maintaining, and using a database. I am testing both solutions at home now. Just some preliminary notes about both for those interested in database stuff under SuSE: 1) adabas carries a big learning curve. I think softwareag needs to consider ways and means to introduce their product using printed materials more and not rely on web or html documentation. 2) many people would like to use adabas d but I believe do not know where to start with it. This means that people get frustrated and tend to look for solutions which will fulfill their needs. I think softwareag needs to build common tools like gui toolkits for people to use that are not longtime adabas d programmers. If a central X based database manager and sources available as printed materials were available newbie database managers would use ADABAS. Now for empress. I like empress because it offers rich toolkits by default for bulding relational database systems. It offers a gui sql toolkit which is something admittedly I needed to get started. The gui sql builder is quite nicely done. Other solutions which work well under SuSe include for me qddb which manages a lot of stuff for me like a cdrom collection, mail addresses, web sites, office stuff, projects, etc. This database program is easilyt set up and allows quite easy creation of databases by adding only one line to your /etc/profile. Im sorry to drone on like this but I think client/server database systems are quite important parts of things. The good news is that all these programs run quite well under SuSE 5.1. empress uses motif libraries extensively and was a piece of cake to install; adabas d installed but required me to hand edit files. empress does this for you. qddb is a rpm package and comes with suse. I have not tested postgreSQL, mysql, or others.. -- --Michael Perry-- mperry@basin.com -- To get out of this list, please send email to majordomo@suse.com with this text in its body: unsubscribe suse-linux-e