Not all databases are created equal

David M Williams
Monday, 11 May 2009 14:09

IT Industry - Development

Make no mistake; there are good reasons why a terminal environment may suit your business. What I don't like, though, is being forced into it by bad software. Frankly, I think if a program requires running terminally to perform adequately then it's a badly written program.

Some examples of programs like this are Sybiz, TimeMinder and ServiceMaster.

Of course, not all bad software is just because the company was cheap.

Another problematic database comes in where the vendor has clearly had money to burn and opted to write a proprietary database system instead of focusing time and effort (including debugging time!) on the core product.

Now, I don't want to stifle innovation here but unless your line of business is databases, don't go writing a database.

In these instances, data is almost certain to be impenetrable and most certainly there won't be any ODBC driver or support for external querying, analysis and reporting tools.

MicrOpay Payroll Manager is one such example. Another is WorkDesk and even MYOB falls into this category, although it does provide limited ODBC functions for a fee.

I expect to be able to write any custom report, or perform any analysis or trending on our data. If a product restricts this then I have a real problem with it.

Whether a software vendor is big or small, budget constrained or not, they're doing me no favours when they neglect to use a database or they think it smart to write one.

They also don't help themself when the marketing people can't articulate their own product.

This can come in the form of WorkDesk responding to my queries by saying "We use a database written in C" - which conveys no useful information at all. The same when GEMMA refers to its use of an "SQL data file."

There are even multitudes of marketeers spruiking about their "SQL" database. This is similarly a term devoid of meaning. Do they mean SQL Server? MySQL? Heck, any database that can accept SQL queries be it ANSI compliant or not?

I must give praise to MYOB who are currently re-engineering their product to use SQL Server but even then their early literature referred to “SQL.NET” which was a similarly meaningless term. Happily, after I challenged them, they now talk about a .NET application using an SQL Server back-end database.

This immediately communicates to corporations the technical landscape required and also silently conveys the higher capabilities you can reliably expect.

Other companies learned this lesson too, with MicrOpay Meridian and Quickbooks now having SQL Server versions, to their customers' satisfaction, and no doubt to a decreased development cost of their own.

The lesson is simple: if you’re a software house and databases aren’t your core business then don’t write one! Secondly, if you sell software, make sure you know the name of your technology. The customers do care.