Hello,

  I have been asked by a client to help them pick an ODBC solution for their
HP3000. We're trying to prepare a "checklist" of options to look for, then
use that checklist to help them choose a solution that meets the most
important criteria for their situation.

  Some of the items we've come up with so far for the checklist (not all
may be critical, but I would like to create as complete a matrix as possible
in order to compare all the solutions as thoroughly as possible);

1) Read AND write capability to Image Databases
2) Support for 'stored procedures'
3) Ability to set security based on OTHER than just the schema security
   (a requirement if you're dealing with 3rd party databases you can't
    control); not having to use MPE Userids would be a plus too
4) Ability to set this security based on data/fields WITHIN records
5) Hi-performance (whatever that means... ;-) )
6) Ability to control the TCP port# used for connections
7) Direct access to Image databases (*NO* DBEs)
8) Read/Write access to KSAM
9) Read/Write access to MPE Files
10) Support for Omnidex/Superdex keys
11) Support for Image B-trees and TPI
12) Read/Write access for self-describing files
13) Price (purchase price and support costs)
14) Planned support for ODBC 3.0 (is that the correct coming version?)
15) Obviously gotta be y2k compliant
16) The ability to pre-select data (do host based queries) and access the
    query results via ODBC
17) Ability to set priority (queues) for certain IDs or query-types
18) Ability to display (on the 3000) a list of userids accessing ODBC and
    what they have open
19) Ability to "cleanly" kill one (or more) of those accessors
20) Ability to support multiple simultaneous queries (multithreaded)
21) Support for optional(?) ODBC calls (like what?)
22) 16 and 32 bit client support
23) Network-friendly installation support (for those of us who may need
    to install to hundreds/thousands of desktops)
24) Support for "BLOB"s
25) Maximum number of concurrent statements/cursors?
26) Support for mapping HP (Roman8) characters to Windows (ANSI)
27) Support for "embedded SQL"

If anyone out there has items to add to the checklist (or corrections if I
mis-stated something - I'm new to SQL and ODBC) please let me know.

I'll share the results of the matrix with the list if there's interest.

   -Chris "remove nospam to reply" Bartram