I expect that VAX is probably pretty mature, to say the least. Last year we
migrated a complex government ABF application from Ingres 6.4 on a VAX to
Ingres 2006 on a bottom-of-the-range Dell server, for less than the cost of
year's maintenance, and gave them a ten-fold boost in performance into the
bargain plus disk-level replication to a standby system. ABF is highly
portable with very minimal effort even porting between platforms as
dissimilar as VMS and Windows. It really was very easy--the hard part was
that the original developers had no source code control system and three or
four variants of every source module. You won't have that problem I am
sure! ;-)

Once you get off the VAX and onto a Windows platform (and stop hemorrhaging
money to look after the VAX), it should be pretty easy to integrate with MS
SQL Server. It would certainly be no harder and probably much easier than
messing around with Enterprise Access Gateways. The gateways mostly work,
but they are an operational hassle and they always end up giving me a bad
scare every time I've deployed one. I sure wouldn't commit to spend money
on one before proving it works in its intended role.

Roy