Hi, I am looking for information on the best way to use VB to connect to
Oracle and AS400 databases without putting an ODBC connection on every
desktop. The company I work for has many sites worldwide and every PC is
connected to the company Intranet. I would therefor like to use a TCP/IP
connection to a middle tier, which would solve a lot of support problems.
I have looked at OLE DB/ADO but am unsure if this solves the problem.
Should I consider MTS and Cobra?. Should I write a server app to run on the
database server myself. The amount of data is not vast. Any suggestions?

Regards, Alistair Sincalair
Team Leader

ADO works fine.
Conway

As far as I know for this moment ADO has to use ODBC so using ADO on every
client doesn't solve your problem. How about using the browser on each
desktop..... In the middle-tier you could use asp, vb-components or
active-docs. Don't know if it solves all your problems but the diverse
client problem is tackled....

Alistair,

Don't know much about the AS400, but for the Oracle side, you can natively
connect using Oracle Objects for Ole.  FWIW, we've developed a generic
middle-tier database handler that sits on an MTS machine.  The client's don't
have ODBC installed, they pass the SQL request to the DB Handler, which
processes the request and returns the resultset.  The DB Handler is based on
ADO.

I'd suggest a HARD look at an ADO/MTS solution.

Gary Spakes
Duke Clinical Research Institute

I am new to MS VB 5.0 and attempted to install the competitive upgrade
product. I am running WIndows 95 on a 486/66 DX2 with 32Mg of RAM. The
install got as far as 95%+ when I received the following:

ACMESETUP

  This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shutdown.

  If the problem persists, contact the program vendor.

  ACMESETUP caused an invalid page fault in module KERNEL32.DLL at
0137:bff9a28c.

  Registers:

  EAX=c00171b0 CS=0137 EIP=bff9a28c EFLGS=00010212

  EBX=0059f57c SS=013f ESP=0058ff2c EBP=005901c8

  ECX=00000000 DS=013f ESI=00000000 FS=24ef

  EDX=bff76648 ES=013f EDI=bffb8aa8 GS=0000

Bytes at CS:EIP:

 53 8b 15 7c c2 fb bf 56 89 4d e4 57 89 4d dc 89

Stack Dump:

I am totally lost. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

                                                                Thanks,
                                                                  Lee

Apart from that, there is not much that can be done about Page Faults
in KERNEL32.DLL...

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The invalid page fault is caused by Windows95 trying to access a
partcicular segment of memory that may not be there...try running
scandisk, restarting, and then installing again.  This should allow you to
get around that memory error...  If that doesn't solve the problem, you
may need to update your Windows95 with the kernel patch, and/or others,
which can be found on the 'net.

Kevin Cooper

OLE DB is the wave of the future, but it solves nothing for the issues you
seem to be trying to deal with (i.e., not having to do an install on each
client.

ADO together with IE is probably your best answer given the criteria you've
listed.  ADO still requires ODBC, but you build a middle teir by using ASP
and escape 95% of it.  Basically, most everything would be server side.  If
you really still wanted to put some of the horse power at the client, you
could add in the RDS, which would give you fairly robust record handling at
the client end - amount other things, you can download a recordset, save it
to disk, mess around with it, and upload changes (handling update collisions
of course).

If you want more information on this, I'd suggest searching the MS site
looking for ADO, RDS, and "ADO Disconnected Recordsets".

Rob