> >(1) If multiple lists are using the DBMS interface, do their tables all
> >have to be in the same DBMS?
>
> Currently, the drivers only support a single DBMS connection. The data
> can be in different physical DBMS if they are networked together. With
> NT you can also have both OCI and ODBC drivers active and use two
> DBMS concurrently. Another way is to run multiple copies of LISTSERV
> connecting to one DBMS each. There isn't much demand for having
> some lists on Oracle, some on SQL and some on DB2 from the same
> logical LISTSERV instance, the typical multi-DBMS case is where you
> have multiple offices which each have an Oracle database for their
> WWW visitors, and that only requires a single DBMS connection.

Well, we run LISTSERV for all of NIH, which is a very large
organization doing many different things.  DBMSs currently in common
use are DB2, IMS, MS SQL Server, Oracle, and Sybase.  I can't predict
all the applications that might arise were we to offer the DBMS
interface to our user community.  Some databases of people that I know
about are in IMS, DB2, Sybase, and SQL Server.  Probably Oracle too.

Three years ago we wrote a program to extract email addresses from a
database and load them into a list.  That's not too hard and should
also be possible to do with other databases without the DBMS interface.
But it does require some programming effort, setting up cron jobs, etc.
in each individual case.  So a general interface would be nicer.