Nikhil,
--- Nikhil Karkera ianmalc@rediffmail.com wrote:
I need to choose a good combination of front & back ends for a database application.
The application is quite simple. It is basically a muster, where employees can sign in by entering an employee-ID.
One possible choice for the backend is PostgreSQL. It has a C interface based on libpq (you'll find it in the documentation) as also an ODBC interface. Your problem will be in the front end, which you say needs to run on legacy 286/ 386 boxen. One possible approach would be to build an interface wrapper around the Postgres backend with libpq, and run a networked client on the 286/ 386 front ends, which you will have to write a customised program for. You'll have no problem running Linux on a 386, and can write a framebuffer or ncurses based front end on it. The 286 is a diferent issue, since ELKS is not mature enough to use in a production environment, and probably does not have most of the features that you will need. Anyway, I believe later versions of MSDOS support TCP/IP, since Microsoft offers a freely downloadable IP stack off their FTP server for MSDOS (I downloaded it a couple of years ago, and it ought to be still around). You could see if you could build your front end with this.
Obvious criticisms of this approach would stem from the excessive overengineering introduced by Postgres for a simple app, but hey, it has a C API, it's free, and it's available! MySQL might be better but I don't know very much about it.
HTH,
Krishnan
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