Product Partners | Database Development

SELECTING A DATABASE
The first step in any data management development process is selecting the database management system. There are many factors that enter into this decision: initial cost of acquisition, development cost, maintenance costs, ease of maintenance, support, performance, reliability, familiarity with the product, corporate mandates, ease of use, and availability of third party tools.

EXPERIENCED DATABASE DEVELOPERS
We have experience with most of the commercial relational database management systems in widespread use today. We have experienced the advantages and disadvantages of these and many other systems and can harness that experience to make your project successful. Our personnel have experience ranging from 14 to 25 years developing multi-million record databases in industries as diverse as communications, distribution, environmental monitoring, marketing, medicine, manufacturing, pharmaceutical, and service industries. We specialize in developing databases for:

Oracle

Ingres

Our proprietary database independent library allows us to develop an application for one database and then redeploy that application for another database by simply changing a configuration value when the program starts. This library is just one of the many ways that we can quickly and efficiently develop applications that can be flexibility deployed.

Following are descriptions of Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) that we support.

ORACLE
Oracle is the leading provider of high performance RDBMS products. It shines in high transaction volume, 24x7 operations such as banking and credit card processing. The Oracle database product is like a high performance racecar that can be tuned for almost any situation. This flexibility and performance does come at the price of requiring more care and handling to set up and maintain the system.

We are experienced Oracle developers, having developed database applications for the education, environmental, heavy manufacturing, and pharmaceutical industries.

MICROSOFT SQL SERVER
Microsoft SQL Server owes its lineage to Sybase SQL Server. Through version 6.5 of Microsoft SQL Server, the Microsoft product and the Sybase product shared common code and internal operations. With SQL Server 7.0, Microsoft entirely revamped the internals of the product, optimizing it to operate under Windows NT. SQL Server is Microsoft's product for database applications having multiple users or requiring more sophisticated features such as transaction logging and stored procedures. While it does not possess all of the powerful features of Oracle, it does cost less to purchase and maintain than to Oracle.

We have extensive experience with Microsoft SQL Server having developed several products for the medical industry.

INGRES
Ingres, Oracle and DB2 are three of the oldest commercial relational database management systems. Since the 1980s Ingres and Oracle have aggressively competed against each other. It was often said, "Ingres has the engineering but Oracle has the marketing." Ingres originally introduced many of the features that are now standard in all relational database management systems. This being said, in the new millennium, Oracle's marketing might eventually provided them with the R&D dollars to match the innovations of Ingres and even to pull ahead in some areas. Even now Ingres still has one of the most stable and easy to manage of the high performance RDBMS products. It is an excellent database to locate at remote offices since it requires a minimal amount of attention from a DBA to efficiently and reliably run day in and day out. Actian Corporation, formerly Ingres Corporation, has released Ingres to to the open source community while continuing to support it for a fee. This will more than likely spur adoption of Ingres into many more environments since 95% of businesses do not need the additional performance that can possibly be obtained with Oracle, and the license cost of Oracle of $5,000-40,000 along with the higher labor costs of managing the Oracle database system makes the free license cost of Ingres look particularly attractive.

We have been providing Ingres solutions since 1988 for the communications and environmental industries.

MICROSOFT ACCESS
Microsoft Access is Microsoft's desktop database product and is part of their Office suite of products. It features an easy point and click interface for creating tables, queries, and reports. Microsoft Access is primarily a single user database that can support multiple users. Microsoft recommends that it be used with no more than 20 concurrent users. While it is a good single user database management system, problems start arising when using it with multiple concurrent users. For example, database will often become corrupted if multiple computers are accessing the database and one of the computers crashes. Another problem with using Access in a multi-user environment is that all of the users must be out of the database while backups take place. Access can also be used as a front end to other databases systems such as Ingres, Oracle, or Microsoft SQL Server. Using it in this manner provides the user with the easy point and click interface for creating queries and reports while retaining the power, security, data integrity, and multi-user features of database servers such as Ingres, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server.

We have extensive experience with Microsoft Access having completed projects for the distribution, educational, environmental, marketing, pharmaceutical, and services industries.

MySQL
MySQL is an open source database that is used extensively for web based applications. Facebook and twitter both use MySQL to store their user data. It is also one of the most used database systems for online retailing.

We have developed applications supporting online retailing.

PostgreSQL
Postgres was developed at the University of California, Berkeley in the late 1980's and early 1990's by some of the same developers of Ingres. It was released to the open source community and has gained a significant following. Max OS X has PostgreSql as its standard database in the server edition.

We have developed a number of appliations for the online retailing and distribution industries using PostgreSQL.

EMBEDDED DATABASES
We can embed Ingres, Microsoft Access, Microsoft SQL Server, SQLite, or our own embedded database management system into your product. Uses of this technology include maintaining configuration information for a piece of equipment, logging operational details of that equipment for later analysis, or maintaining an electronic maintenance log for that equipment.