I'm faily new to the world of Postgre so excuse me if these questions seem ignorant.

My current employer develops a software package which runs on OpenVMS on HP Alpha/Itanium servers and contains a custom
database comprised of various format text and binary files. I.e. not in a real database engine.

In order for our customers to have a wider range of reporting on their database (via M$ Access, M$ Excel, CrystalReports, websites
and other such facilities) I have some programs which replicate updates in this pseudo-database over the network to a Weendoze
server on which I have a program written in VB which pipes the data updates via ODBC into an M$ SQL server.

A number of months ago I was pointed towards Postgre as a reliable database server after which I signed up to a number of these
mailing lists and have been reading them quite extensively since that time.

Having made a decision to port this SQL server database into Postgre I have a few questions before I get started:

1.) Would running Postgre and SQL Server on the same machine cause any conflict with each other (other then competing for
CPU/Memory)

2.) Would there be any drastic changes required to the VB program to get it to communicate or would the ODBC driver take
care of everything for me? The program in question does nothing fancy, a simple take of the data coming across the network
and pushing it into the designated database i.e. purley add/update single row at a time.

3.) Are there any significant differences in functionality between the two systems I should be aware of that may cause problems
down the line.

4.) Can anyone offer any other pointers on what I should look out for when doing this transition.

And given my lack of unix/linux/etc experience, yes it has to run on weenbloze - unless there is an OpenVMS port? ;) 

Thanks in advance for any suggestions/information.

Cheers,
Paul.

-- 
Paul Lambert
Database Administrator
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