Many of the database vendors are asking you to switch to their religion. They provide migration tools to go from one proprietary format of data storage to another, hoping to thereby win all of your business. The drawbacks to this wholesale conversion of data from you legacy system to the ‘new technology’ is that it leaves behind your legacy hardware, and if not the hardware, then for sure the application’s code. And what if something happens to your new database vendor? What if he decides to obsolete all of your new investment in applications code next year by changing the format of his toolset or database? Today’s corporate computing solutions requires you to build bridges between islands of data, not merge all of your islands of data into a single continental land mass. Your existing application code and databases represent investments that may not be obsolete just yet, or represent a part of your business that while not justifying modernization return reliable revenue just the same, however faced with a re-write of their IT software, they may just become unviable. PRO-IV database independence allows you to retain your legacy data as legacy data. You can leave your RMS files in RMS and your DB/2 data in DB/2. Not only that, but you can develop your new applications without considering the databases that you will find at your customer’s site or which database your next acquisition has installed in house. PRO-IV provides you with the power of a modern 4GL without committing to any database vendor’s products. You can develop applications secure in the knowledge that PRO-IV will manage your database independence as well as your platform independence and let you concentrate on the applications development and deployment across a wide range of databases, operating systems and hardware platforms PRO-IV The Total Enterprise Solution for Information that Empowers The task of delivering a seamless yet controlled stream of information that empowers is technically complex and challenging. The ability to run applications across heterogeneous database(that is, data that resides on different hardware platforms, different operating systems, different network operating systems, and different databases) is a fundamental need today, and it can be addressed today without having to wait or to change and replace everything that is already in place.