First, don't discount foxpro. it's not half bad. It's not Postgresql,
but it is a pretty nice little engine.
Here's what I'd do. Buy him Joel Celcko's SQL for Smarties.
Have him do as many examples as he can understand in both foxpro and
postgresql.
While postgresql seems to be able to do many of them, most other
semi-rdbms systems like mysql and foxpro quickly fall short.
As a plus, he might actually pick up some database theory while he's
reading it, and that wouldn't be all bad either :-)
At the same time he is learning why foxpro isn't probably the best choice
On Fri, 3 May 2002, David Siebert wrote:
> I have a wannabe programer that works for me and he my not for long, nagging
> me that we should use FoxPro instead of PostgreSQL and Java.
> I have tried and tried to explain this to him. I have tried to show him that
> FoxPro is not mainstream anymore. He is a pain in my butt. Would anyone like
> to point me to a comparison between FoxPro and PostgreSql. I can find
> comparisons between DB-2 or Oracle or MySQL and Postgres but not FoxPro. I
> can guess why. I hate being a dictator about things like and I have tried to
> help him by saying he could do one little internal project in FoxPro but he
> can not even get FoxPro to use ODBC to connect to Postgres. I do not care to
> learn anymore about ODBC than what I need to hook Openoffice calc to my
> database.
>
> By the way this guy does not even know how to do a binary or to decode a BCD
> date. When I asked if it FoxPro had a binary shift he told me it had lots of
> keyboard funtions :(
>