DataTrak Business Solutions.Claudio, I thought you might like a thought from "the other side of the street", meaning that for the most part, we use VB 6.0 for our flagship product, EzTouchPOS Restaurant Management System, a Touch Screen based Point of Sale application for the hospitality industry. Like most visual basic programmers, we've used an MS Access database for our back-end database. Because of our excellent growth, we are taking on larger and larger accounts with well known restaurant franchises. A "Flat File" database became no longer viable for us to use and so we began a search for a solution that would fit our needs. Our application performs a tremendous amount of UPDATE and INSERTS in addition to constant SELECTS to retrieve information on Point of Sale terminals. Because we are a relatively small company in an industry that's dominated by the likes of Aloha and Micros, the cost of the database back end is very important. This is because we must keep our pricing model competitive enough to garner attention from larger restaurant chains until they can see first hand, the quality and functionality of our Point of Sale system. Interbase/Firebird have been a boon to us because they are robust, secure, fast and reliable. Interbase allows us to include a very good relational database system with our POS system while still being able to enjoy a price advantage over our competition. We have made it a point to abstract data access through classes that convert all database interaction to SQL 92 compliant instruction which is passed to the database through ADO. Because of this, we were able to port our application over to Interbase/Firebird in about 3 days using straight SQL access. We now have 4 restaurants beta testing our new "SQL" version with one being a Night Club producing about 2000-3000 Sales Records with an average of 8 Child records for Sales Detail (about 16,000 to 24,000) per night in addition to Employee Clock In's, Manager Voids/Comps, etc. Reports run lightning fast as well. We are now in the process of porting much of the data manipulation to the back-end via Stored Procedures and Triggers. All in all, we are very please with Interbase/Firebird and will continue to embed this excellent RDMS with our Point of Sale package. I sincerely believe that with the continued development of OLE DB providers and ODBC interfaces, many VB programmers will (or at least should) come to embrace this excellent RDBMS. Especially for independent VB developers, there should be no other choice.
Please feel free to publish my email address as well as website (see below) on your wonderful site. Yours in Service,
Lee Jenkins, [] |
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This page was last updated on 2001-12-14 02:52:50 |