Jonathan Hutchins <> 03/09/05 05:55PM >>>
On 09 March 2005 05:25 PM, Bill Cavalieri wrote:
Brian Kelsay
There used to be a series of PC databases - DB II, DB III, DB IV. Whatever happened to those?
Relational/Object DB's negated most of the need for them, SQLite would be a good example. The dBASE's are still around, some utilities in Linux let you read/convert from dBASE formats.
Oh, right, yeah, dBASE, now apparently on version 7.5, and still going at http://www.dbase.com . Some companies (AT&T) had a pretty big investment in it, I guess they've kept it going, but I don't see much demand for it in the job market.
dBASE is a cheap database, but this is the type of product that I can see disappearing soon due to lack of interest. The even cheaper or free options will wipe them out. It's sad, but it happens. And with student pricing at $99 I would kill an instructor that chose that over MySQL or Postgres. Hal, how was Btrieve wiped out? What other databases have died anybody?
On Thursday 10 March 2005 07:25 am, Brian Kelsay wrote:
dBASE is a cheap database, but this is the type of product that I can see disappearing soon due to lack of interest. The even cheaper or free options will wipe them out.
Considering that it's been around in one format or another since the early eighties, I doubt it. Once a company has their custom POS/Inventory program in it, or their report analysis code, they tend to cling to it forever.
This is one of the things that drives Microsoft nuts with the need to backport new versions of windows so some big customer's database originally written in some DOS 2 application will still run.
They'll pay for the hardware upgrades, they'll pay for the software upgrades, but they'll be damned if they'll put themselves in the hands of one of those wierd, overpaid, diva programmers again. The CEO _still_ remembers that that stupid nerd drove a nicer car than he did, and he couldn't browbeat him if he wanted the project done.
FoxPro is much the same, there were some good apps written in it, and unless some altruistic above-average programmer comes along and converts them to Open Source, knowing he'll never see them agian, they will persist.
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Brian Kelsay -
Jonathan Hutchins