CompuServe Messages

We urgently need some help!!!! I am the European Vice-President for Research of Computer Sciences Corp. (as you may know, the second largest systems integrator in the world). We have been developing a system for one of our clients in France, client-server based, Oracle DB on the server, WFW3.11 on the workstations. This is a large development contract, worth several million dollars. The system is written in Visual C++, is completely object oriented and uses the Foundation Classes extensively. We had recommended to the client that the access to the databases should be via ODBC in order to increase flexibility. The system is made up of several programs, each of which can be active at the same time, and hits the same databases. The problem we have (and believe me we have tried almost everything): each of the programs sets up its own ODBC connection to the database, and after a couple of workstations have started, Oracle runs out of authorized user connections (the system is set up for 30 users). We have explained the problem to Oracle, and they are willing to allow for more connections at a discounted price, but our client does not want to pay the increased number of connections. Moreover, every time Oracle opens up an ODBC connection, it requires an extra megabyte of memory on the server, and this also costs money and runs the risk of hitting the max memory on the chosen server (Pentium with 128MB). We need to find a way to share ONE ODBC connection amongst several programs, but: 1 – The database class has some static variables, and the object cannot be in a DLL, so the ODBC connection cannot be shared in this way 2 – We have tried to allocate the connection in a DLL and pass back to each of the programs the handles to the connection, overriding the Database Open method, but this does not seem to work either. We are getting NO technical support from Microsoft France, except for a suggestion to put the problem on Compuserve. Can you help? If necessary we will fly to Redmond to meet with yourselves in order to show the problem and the attempted solutions!!! Paul G Mariotti Vice-President for Advanced Technologies Computer Sciences Corporation, Europe 100064,3331