Pervasive and Tango?

Question

We are currnetly looking at redeveloping an Interanet application that was created it would appear with Pervasive SQL and Tango (it usues TAF fiels so this is out assumption).

Looking at the Pervasive website I cannot even find any references for Tango now. Is this product no longer being sold or used? Are there any resources available on Tango?

Secondly, what is the easiest way to setup a local Pervasive database from the MKD and DDF files so that we can get it running and then perform an export to get it into SQL Server?

Our plan is to port the data over to a new structure in SQL Server and redevlop a frontend in ASP.NET. The main challenge now is to just access the existing data and code as best we can.

Answer 1

The Tango product was taken over by (and renamed to) WiTango. http://witango.com/content.taf

Answer 2

As mentioned above, it is now sold as WiTango by an Australian firm. I was the lead QA engineer on the IDE at Pervasive before the product line was shut down in July of 2000. Long story short was that they couldn't scale the server piece quickly enough to meet up with market realities.

The original server was written for the pre-OS X Mac OS (Mac OS 9 and prior), which used cooperative multi-tasking. This allowed the server to use as many CPU cycles as possible, and effectively dominate the scheduler. When you start throwing multi-CPU machines in the mix (this was in the days before multi-core dies), and trying to work on round-robin schemes - it started running out of gas. It's a pity because the IDE was quite nice.

Answer 3

I've been using Tango/WiTango since about 1998. This server/dev toolkit product is by far the easiest to use and most reliable app. development tool I've ever come across. I wouldn't want to build an international banking app with it but probably could if I had to. I never got into the Pervasive SQL model, preferring to use ODBC instead. Some apps. I've built with this server & toolkit have been running non stop for over 6 years and these were never designed to be high availability apps. Fantastic.