Hi Placide;

   That is an excellent idea for your DBMS! The cloud is basically a fancy name for the old "service bureau" term. Cloud providers can house your DBMS on their platform. You can then expose the DBMS via its Cloud IP address. This would normally be done by creating an O/S instance (ie: MS-Windows Server edition). I myself personally use Amazon's EC2 feature to host my SA & SS DBMS. Most cloud vendors offer the same. Once the instance is built, its assigned an internal IP address.

   The next thing I did was to create an Amazon "Elastic" address. This allows the cloud vendor to assign a fixed IP address that is externally visible. It also allows for the EC2 virtual machine to be restarted on any other VM where the IP address is different. However, Amazon always keeps the Elastic IP address pointing to the ever changing internal EC2 machine's IP address. That way, your PB App only needs to connect to (know about) the external Elastic IP address.

   In the case of the Elastic IP address that gets redirected internally - your App really only needs to know what "port" your DBMS is listening to in order to complete the DB connection. In the case of my SS's its port 1433. Note that many other vendors implement this "Elastic" IP concept (ie: RackSpace, IBM. etc).

FYI:  https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/elastic-ip-addresses-eip.html

HTH

Regards

I agree with Armeen, create a webservice to do this validation and call it from your PB app.

A desktop app can use the GetURL function to grab a text file or run a web script.

Sounds like it would be best you create a C# Web API using PowerBuilder 2019 and then call this Web API from your PB app using the new enhanced RESTClient (enhanced in PowerBuilder 2019). 

There are some simple tutorials here to help you get started: https://www.appeon.com/support/documents/appeon_online_help/index.html

And yes, you will need the Cloud Edition to create C# Web APIs.

Thanks very much for replying. I forgot to say that my clients are not in the same network or location. Just like when you get into PowerBuilder, Appeon validates your subscription. That's the idea. 

This is a simple table updae and validation.
I'm not sure why the table would need to be in the cloud, but it most certainly can be done in that manner.

You can also do this in a client/server app by loading the contents of the table into the app and updatingthe table as required. Set a time to refresh the table every so often, if required.

Olan