Here is a story. There is a company in Brazil with about 20,000
clients all over Brazil. They made a decision to move from BTrieve
to PostgreSQL. BTrieve had been supplied by DBExperts. After a
sales pitch to by the owner of DBExperts, the board of directors,
have made a subsequent decision to move to Pervasive.SQL.
This company has very high visibility. And I think dbExperts
gets around the area of Brazil a lot, too.
Oh, the funny part... The sales pitch for Pervasive.SQL included:
* "You install the software and forget it!"
* [ and if you have Btrieve files then ] "...you can access these
files with transactional procedures if you like to."
I'm have no idea what to do about the problem, but I know
that the (postgresql) person doing the data migration is miserable.
As we know, PostgreSQL is big in Brazil. It is likely DbExperts
is shooting themselves in the foot.
This is the kind of thing we should know about. I'm not sure
we could provide enough fodder to override the salespitch
in a particular case since that pretty much has to be an inside job.
The only thing I can think of is to tell the story.
People make bad business decisions all the time.
elein
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elein@varlena.com Database Consulting www.varlena.com
"Free your mind the rest will follow"
-- En Vogue