Hi Michael
Yes you can! I don't know which of your presidents said that, but it applies here I guess.
As I said in that post, I am an old programmer with very little patience to read an enormous amount of information. But my son, currently working for a US company as a software engineer enlightened me and helped me set it up.
I opened an account in AWS, and for a year I shall be able to use their services for free. In AWS you have something they call RDS, which is basically what I was looking for: a SQL Server as a service, meaning all I need is to instance a SQL Server and work from anywhere accessing all of the databases. And I will just pay for what I use and for the time I use it. it has to do with hours per month, or number of clicks or whatever, but it will amount to no more that 50 bucks, for what I gather.
They have MySQL also as a service I believe, but since I only deal with SQL Server, I would not know how good that is.
But the important thing here is you do not need to get a VM with a SQL engine inside, which is the case with Google Cloud Computing. You can get one though, through a different service they call EC2 and EC3, but that is too much for my limited purposes. (I have small clients, with few stores to operate, so I do not need too much complexity)
In my case, I simply create a ODBC connection string and use it in my VFP app, accessing the AWS SQL Server with as much ease as I can access the LAN server.
BTW, because in my country sometimes we have problems with the internet service, I implemented a special routine that will access a local server as well. In case there is a connection failure, the stores work locally and then, when the service is restored, the routine updates the cloud server with all the transactions missed. No big deal there.
I know I could set up a replication paradigm, but then it costs more money and my stingy clients do not like to pay too much.
I hope it helps
Regards
Rafael Copquin
El 23/10/2017 a las 20:28, mbsoftwaresolutions@mbsoftwaresolutions.com escribió:
On 2017-10-23 16:49, Stephen Russell wrote:
I don't think that you can just stand up your data there in AWS. I believe that you must expose it via an API. You pass in params to your method and it spits out data in XML or json.
Now to be very clear, I'm not talking about using DBFs -- I'm talking about backends like SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, etc.....from a VFP app.
[excessive quoting removed by server]