Advice Needed

Unregistered says : The company I am working for has developed an application,which has been deployed at many offices of many clients..about 700
for last 10 years..now we want to move to .net framework..the core functionality needs to remain same..but we want ease of deployment(so thinking of smart client),cleaner and flexible program(present software has many bugs and ,is rigid)..now my concern is that the existing database design is not optimised as per normalisation rules..and we would like to reddesign it..which means the data in the existing databases will need to be ported..what r the various ways one can go about it? good practices? Or other option is to with present database only..and just develop the application..how big a risk this will be?

bas says : It is rather difficult to say... is the current database structure causing any problems? performance, maintainability, etc. how much do these problems costs you and your customers?

If you want to change to a different db design, will it solve the problems? will it introduce new ones? Do your customers want this? Who will pay for all datamigrations? Is it worth it?

If you need to change the structure, it seems the time is now when you are rebuilding your system completely anyway.

Question remains: is the change needed because "it needs to be normalized" or is the current design causing problems?

Hope this helps.
Bas

deepak102ind@hotmail.com says : As the time passes by its beter to move on from legacy systems. .net is a great choice but before starting with new systems its wise to analyse the problems and new features that may make the software with tune to the time.

.Net offers great advancements and its better to have application architecture in place before proceeding.

Deepak Sharma
Orient Technologies