Dateline February 3 - Austin
Apple’s launch of the iPad last week was another reminder that I’m a late adopter. I realize that’s unusual as a career technology guy but somewhere along the way I developed an unnatural avoidance of trendiness. The iPad is a great example - it’s new, cool, and I don’t want one - yet.
There’s another related philosophy I subscribe to: If it works, don’t fix it. This is an approach that seems to be especially popular among some of our customers. The number of folks who contact us with questions about products we haven’t shipped in many, many years is amazing. We regularly get questions about Btrieve 6.15 – it was released *fifteen* years ago.
Pervasive as a company totally understands this. We’ve been building low/no IT databases for a very long time and it’s gratifying that customers are happy with a product for what amounts to multiple lifetimes in technology time. (Think of it like dog years. Technology industry time = 7 years of normal industry time.) Don’t think these customers are technology luddites, just sitting still. You can guarantee that they’ve been adding features to their applications the whole time – they just haven’t changed the database. Because it works just fine.
Another bit of technology that’s been around for dog years and works just fine is a lot of COBOL code. The language just had its 50th birthday (Born 1959. Just FYI - the same year Alaska and Hawaii were admitted to the United States) and there are 250 billion lines of COBOL out there powering business applications. That’s a lot. And, for those of you supporting COBOL applications, you might know that Btrieve (which is what eventually became Pervasive PSQL) is, at its heart, a spectacularly fast ISAM data store. But, it’s an ISAM that runs on 64-bit, Windows 7 and just about every other up to date bit of technology you can think of. If you want to get your perfectly good COBOL application running on the latest platform, you don’t need to “fix” anything – just migrate to PSQL. Check out our paper on using Pervasive PSQL as the best ISAM ever. Stay tuned – there’s more on the way.
Even if things work fine most of the time, it’s prudent to have a disaster plan. This week, Pervasive just made it even simpler to have a disaster preparedness plan. It’s called Pervasive PSQL Insurance. Simply, it’s an inexpensive temporary license (think small fraction of the cost of a permanent license) to get your business back online until you can call Pervasive Support. Perfect for those weekends and long holidays that seem to be disaster magnets (nothing bad ever seems to happen 9 – 5). Find out more in this month’s newsletter.
So that’s another view of Pervasive PSQL. We’re late adopter enablers, we play beautifully with other classic technologies (you get to be a classic if you’re over 25 and still cool), and when the apocalypse comes (or the dog eats your server), we’ve got your back with insurance.