There was a lot of "Crazy" decisions made in the Move from 6.x to 7.x that the user and ultimately DataEase had to pay the price for.

As you might be aware of it was a completely different development team that made DataEase 7.x from 8.x but it is safe to say that we have had to pay the price for their "mistakes".

It would be easy to say that they didn't know what they were doing, but it wouldn't be true. 

A lot of the work is "sound" and a lot of the things they tried to do was the right "stuff" but it just didn't end well.

One thing that has become very clear to us during this project is the importance of personality and mentality of management and team.

You can even say "belief system".

The 7.x team was technically minded so they deemed something "working" when it was technically possible to achieve it.

We have learnt the hard way that you can't expect of you users to have the same insight into the product as  yourself, so you should try to make it both easy and understandable.

Easy to succeed.

Just because it is possible to do something doesn't mean that most user will be able to invest the time to figure it out. But if it is easy, straight forward or even simple to do it, it is much more likely that the majority will be able to benefit from it.

One "critical" stage in the move from 6.x to 7.x was migration.

You buy and install DataEase 7.x and then you want to use it on your existing application 6.x.

You open the product and you browse to your application catalogue....Nothing!

You can't see your app.

So what do you do?

Maybe I need to migrate? So you start dragging in the file menus, but there is no Migration option...

You have to resort to the documentation and you find out that there is a migration utility.

In XP and Windows 7 this was also available in the Startup Group...imagine in Window 8,10...

You start the migration tool and get a lot of awkward questions.

You need to migrate to a new catalogue, but you can't create this catalogue from the tool....

We will stop there as we think you got the picture.

Not easy! Not Straightforward! Not likely to succeed! 

In 8.5 we have addressed this and even though we still think that there should never have been a need for migration, that is now water under the bridge.

In 8.5 you can browse and find all applications from DFD 5.x to DFW 8.5 including DFW 5.x 6.x 7.x and 8.0, 8.1, 8.2

When you try to open it, DE8.5 will correctly read the version and offer you a Migration/Conversion option.

Rest easy, it will take a backup of your original application before proceeding.


It will migrate DFD 5.x (tables, relationships, derivations and data), DFW 5.x and DFW 6.x while it will simply upgrade 7.x through to 8.2

After the one click migration it will simply open the application in 8.5 so you can inspect, test and start to use it.

Good luck!