At some stage in their life-cycles many commercial databases will outgrow the capabilities of 4D and may need to be migrated to another database. A popular choice is Oracle. However Oracle itself offers a limited set of tools for accessing and manipulating the data.

4D offers the tools necessary to access Oracle data, from both Mac OS and Windows. An effective strategy therefore is to use 4D as the front-end (the user interface) and Oracle as the back end (the data store). This approach maintains much of your original investment in 4D and can maintain the consistency of the user interface.

This technical note discusses some of the problems that you will face in converting a pure 4D application to using Oracle as a back end, and offer some suggestions for solving these problems.


Tech Note