ROFLOL – hotroster, well I never thought I'd see the day..... you sound like the kind of fella who'd by a car purely on its looks, indeed just the sort of person that J&G Bethanis love to sell AIMS to.
Do you know, I actually once sat across a table from GlenB and asked him why the database design was not 'normalised' and what they were doing about making it so ? His reply was that whilst the design did not lend itself to systems integration, and that it was indeed
not fully relational they were not (at that time) planning to change it (i.e. and as to why, see my comments above) – and I won’t even bother to explain the why’s and wherefores as to their use of Text type database columns, and the limits therein w.r.t. accessing them.
W.r.t. database technology – Btrieve / Pervasive are I’m afraid mickey mouse / cheap and cheerful databases, certainly so when compared to Oracle / Sybase / DataServer, etc.....
And there’s a rub, i.e. if an airline already has a site-license for an industrial strength database (Sybase / Oracle) – and many of them do - why on earth should they have to suffer with something second best, to say nothing of having to support / manage it ?!
Unfortunately, AIMS was never designed to be database independent, e.g. you can’t readily slide the airline in-house database of choice underneath the AIMS application – which is a great shame, particularly so with systems integration in mind (but hey, with the Oracle implementation, maybe they’re trying to achieve just that – and if they are, well done ! )
Now for what it’s worth – here’s a
précis of the contents of my computing CV:
Extensive experience with Unix (20 years, IBM AIX, HP-UX, Sun, Bull, ICL, SCO, Linux - everything from day-to-day admin through to writing compilers), Windows (all flavours, inc NT Server), and Macintosh.
19 years hands-on development experience using everything from C, C++, Fortan, Pascal, ADA, Accell SQL, Ingres, Vision,
VB.
10 years team leading & project development, usually worldwide with publicly known ‘Blue Chip’ companies and government bodies.
11 years working with, and in the development of, GUI development tools, including the development of Cad/Cam systems (running within X11 - Motif/Openlook) and many of the more modern ones.
17 years RDBMS design & maintenance (Oracle / Sybase / Unify-DataServer / Ingres / etc).
Installation and management of LAN’s / WAN’s, including VPN’s.
Web authoring, as well as developmet of backend web ‘services’.
Extensive experience of systems / database integration.
Basically everything from development, technical support, trouble-shooting, consultancy, training, to IT/Systems management.
Actually hotroster I could go on and really guild-the-lily, but why bother, you wouldn’t have a clue about a lot of what I’m on about, aside from which your bonefides for slating my computing experience include, well, what... ?