OK, it is a very broad question and I know that.

I have an older VB6 application concerning the weapons, vehicles used in Normandy 1944. It was where I cut my teeth in VB6 and was converted from a VBDOS application which in turn came from an initial QB4.5 development.


The launcher.


The program on the desktop - under ReactOS.

I have been re-educating myself and trying to improve my programming skills and familiarising myself with different technologies with an aim to pick up this old project of mine and converting it so that it falls in line with technologies available in the early 21st century. This allows me to slowly improve the application with what I know now and correct the flaws I built-in during its QB45 creation.

When I was creating it initially, database technology was arcane, expensive or my knowledge was paltry/faulty. For some reason I decide to create my own DB which is really a flatfile containing records and CSV data. It had some data areas that acted as reference points to the data to allow faster access to specific areas of the DB.

It was very quick and did the job but I was always aware that it was non-standard, potentially flaky in operation and in creating my own I was getting no experience from real-life databases.

So, to my question: If I was to convert this database to something industry standard, cheap and easy to maintain, that is preferably FOSS and multi-platform, what would you suggest?

The app is staying in VB6 and its future might be with RADBasic/TwinBasic, being just a GUI to a database, so it should be migratable. I need a solution that allows the app to continue to grow.

I was stymied by the the 'loss' of VB6 when .NET came out in 2001 and all development stopped but I'd like to get this application out of the doldrums and resurrect it.

Bearing in mind the direction outlined above, I 'd love to hear your technical suggestions.

You'd really be helping me with this as this software was an important bit of my life and my halting development on this has remained as a negative emotional weight that I have carried around with me for decades.

It is time to fix this app and regain my emotional equilibrium!