The Pervasive Answerman (with Zippy the Answerdog)

Why I Don't Own an iPad or...My Life as a Late Adopter

answerman — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 23:32:00 GMT

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.

Death, Taxes, Upgrades and Procrastina...

answerman — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 21:15:00 GMT

Dateline December 17 – Austin

Are you one of those who has their holiday shopping finished before Halloween? (This obviously only applies to the North Americans amongst you, feel free to substitute with your favorite pre New Year festivity if you are a rest-of-worlder.) I envy and hate you at the same time. I’m a lifelong procrastinator – get a lot of things done at the very last minute. If you think I’m bad, hang out with Zippy for awhile. Dogs don’t plan. Ever. That’s why they’ve got superb smell and hearing and great reaction times. Ten million years of evolution and not planning a single minute will give you pretty good reaction times.

Mine and Zippy’s frailties aside, there are a few things that everyone should plan for. Death. Taxes. And…upgrades. Especially upgrades of software running your business. Hardware upgrades happen when we can afford them – usually every 5 years or so. Those upgrades are often driven by software anyway – new application, new operating system, etc. Application upgrades, especially infrastructure application upgrades, are a bit less organized.

The standard theory is “If it works, don’t touch it.” Given the quality of some brand new software, a lot of us wait until service pack 1, or 2, or… That’s sensible too. What is scary though, is how many businesses running accounting, point of sale, office management (i.e. business critical) applications are perfectly happy to run them unchanged for years and years. Even after they are no longer supported. It’s scary because a perfectly good application on Windows 95 may have some serious challenges running on Windows 7. It might run, but it probably isn’t going to be tested and it sure won’t be supported.

Running unsupported software as a critical part of your business operation means that you just moved from the shopper who gets everything done by October to Zippy the no planning dog. You’ve got no backup and no plan. A call to support to fix whatever problem will eventually arise (and sooner or later it absolutely will arise) will be answered with “I’m sorry. That version is no longer supported.”

Why the upgrade rant? It’s because as of January 1, 2010 support for Pervasive PSQL v9 ends. Which means if your customers are running PSQL v9 under your application they’re going to be really upset if they call support the day after New Year’s and find out they’re out of luck. (Side note: For you stalwart PSQL v9 on NetWare customers, no worries. We’re still shipping v9 on NetWare and support is still available albeit for a minor fee.)

The current version of PSQL v10 is SP3, so no need to wait for it to get better – it’s perfect. For customers who might be in the middle of a general upgrade to Windows 7, PSQL v10 SP3 is compatible (and we’ve got the logos from Microsoft to prove it). It’s a great release, it’s timed perfectly with a big improvement in Windows and best of all it’s a dirt cheap form of insurance. Anyone who compares the risk of unsupported software causing lost business and problem fixing that’s bound to happen eventually with the price of an upgrade is going to upgrade every time. Here’s a simple holiday rhyme to help you remember to get those customers upgraded and keep them safe and supported. (Apologies to Messrs. Coots and Gillespie – the folks who wrote Santa Claus is Coming to Town. Click here for the melody so you can sing along.)

                                                                   You Better Watch Out
                                                                   You Better Not Cry
                                                                   You Better Upgrade
                                                                    I’m Telling You Why
                                                                   PSQL 9 is Going Off Support

Thanks everyone for an absolutely awesome 2009! Have a safe and happy holiday and we’ll see you again in 2010.

Windows 7 Compatibility, RC for PSQL v10 SP3, New Book - It's Been Busy

answerman — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:19:00 GMT

Dateline October 16 – Austin

It’s been a busy few months since Zippy and I last sat down to the keyboard. We’re all getting ready for the release of Windows 7 on Oct 22 – specifically Pervasive is releasing PSQL v10 SP3 which is already compatible with Windows 7. Yep, we’re that fast. If you’re a long time watcher of Pervasive product releases you know that we’re typically very close behind the major platform changes. With PSQL v10 SP3 though, Engineering has really outdone itself. We did a lot of work around Vista compatibility and it paid off for Windows 7. Expect to see a release candidate very soon, and if all goes well, the finished product will be available for download shortly afterwards.

Another important feature of PSQL v10 SP3 is the addition of product activation to the shrink wrap products – everything that’s sold through ISV’s and Distributors. Product activation is just an improved way of making sure that the copy of PSQL you get is valid. The longer definition would be a key validation process that verifies the copy of software is legitimate, correctly licensed and on the appropriate hardware and software platform. We’ve written about it before, and if you’ve downloaded a trial or bought anything at the Pervasive e-store, you’ve seen product activation. Pervasive Engineering has done another fine job making the change nearly invisible. The biggest difference is that activating a key on PSQL now requires an Internet connection – and in this day and age, very few computer users don’t have an Internet connection. And, for those rare few who don’t have Internet connections, there are a couple of ways to handle activation. Check out this month’s newsletter for a whitepaper telling you everything you need to know about product activation.

Next amazing thing – a brand new book – The SQL Guide to Pervasive PSQL by Rick F. van der Lans. It’s awesome – 643 page of everything (I really mean *everything*) you could ever want to know about SQL for Pervasive PSQL. Mr. van der Lans is a SQL uber guru, having written the Introduction to SQL almost 20 years ago (now in its 4th edition – a LOT of people learned SQL from this book) as well as books on SQL for Ingres, MySQL, and SQLite. If you’re a Pervasive PSQL developer (and who else would be reading this blog?), you need a copy of this book. It’s available now at http://www.lulu.com and will be on Amazon soon. Just to get some perspective about how momentous this is – guess when the last Pervasive PSQL book was published? Ready? 1995 – Btrieve Complete by Jim Kyle (also an awesome book). This stuff doesn’t happen every day – order Rick’s book now.

Corporate News – Pervasive acquires ChanneLinx, a web based business exchange automation software company. Translation – ChannelLinx (now Pervasive Business Xchange) enables e-commerce, documentation, electronic information, etc. between business partners. If you’re a small to mid-sized business and have requirements from partners to eliminate paper in your transactions, check out http://www.channelinx.com/index.html. They’ve got the tools, consulting and experience to set up the whole thing for you. And, a great added bonus – getting rid of all that paper makes your company a whole lot more green.

Stay tuned – lots more to come.

What's Next for MySQL?

answerman — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:25:00 GMT

Dateline July 30 - Austin

As a long time fan and ex-employee of Sun Microsystems, I've been watching with great interest the proceedings leading up to the acquisition of Sun by Oracle. And, for those of us in the database business, the really important question is "What's going to happen to MySQL?"

Recent History

Indulge me while I review a bit of recent history. Back in 2008 in the midst of a really bad climate for IPO's, Fortune Magazine touted MySQL as one of the likely companies to go public that year. MySQL had been talking about the possibility for more than a year, seeming to have weathered the potential problems of Oracle buying up InnoDB (the transactional storage engine of choice for MySQL). They had 10,000 paying customers, revenue growing nicely, etc. Looked like a great time to go public.

Less than a week after the Fortune article, Sun put up $1 billion to acquire MySQL. Fantastic! Investors and a few MySQL folks get rich. There's now enough money and open source culture at Sun to extend MySQL's success and get the business growing in the enterprise space where it can compete with the likes of Oracle, IBM, and Sybase et al. Open source rules.

Move ahead 16 months. Key developers and founders are gone (Michael "Monty" Widenius, Marten Mickos, David Axmark) and Sun's acquisition by Oracle is imminent. It will probably be complete in the next month according to insiders at Sun.

What Happens Next?

The next act in the drama is already unfolding. Monty Widenius has created the Open Database Alliance - a vendor neutral consortium with the goal of unifying all development, and products and services, surrounding MySQL Database Server. This includes the launch of a community developed implementation of MySQL called MariaDB (because Sun owns all the trademark rights associated with MySQL, and, the more fun reason, because Monty's younger daughter is named Maria). According to the FAQ , MariaDB was "developed with the goal of being the default transactional AND non-transactional storage engine for MySQL." In other words, Monty wants his database back.

Old School Software Companies

Meanwhile, Oracle hasn't spent a lot of time talking about the MySQL component of the Sun acquisition in the press. It's happened before. If you search at the Oracle website for information on InnoDB, most of what you find is links to the acquisition press releases and links to the InnoDB site. Since most observers at the time saw the purchase as a preemptive defensive move by Oracle (to not lose low and eventually high end customers to MySQL), the lack of fit by InnoDB in Oracle's database ecosystem is not surprising. It is, I suspect, a good indicator of future behavior with respect to MySQL.

Oracle is old school. The vast majority of their revenue isn't coming from open source support and they don't give software away (neither the free beer nor free speech kind) unless it's part of a larger strategic plan to get you to buy enterprise products later. Oracle has a lot of database products - Enterprise ($$$$), Standard ($$), and Express (free - as in free beer) editions. But wait, there's more: Berkeley DB (used to be Sleepy Cat - open source, embeddable, transaction processing, non-SQL), Database Lite (mobile), Oracle Times Ten (in memory database), and of course InnoDB (which hasn't been rebranded to be "Oracle" anything).

Eliminating the Competition

Oracle's biggest win in the MySQL/Sun context is eliminating a potential competitor. They will surely carry forward the bulk of the MySQL commercial support contracts, but with those estimated at $60 to $70 million in revenue, it's not like Oracle ($22.4 billion) is going to live or die by MySQL's success. What clearly won't happen, though, is a near term replacement of MySQL. MariaDB will be years before it can successfully replace MySQL's code base (and that's assuming that Oracle's attorneys just sit quietly by and let it all happen), and even longer to shift the commercial customer base.

The Forecast - "Trust Us, We're One of You" and "That's All Folks"

What's our forecast for the future? First, Oracle will happily profess support for MySQL, open source, developer communities, free software, free love, etc. They might even join ODA - although having not done so at this point means a) they're too busy working on the Sun acquisition, or b) just don't care. (Zippy votes "b".) Second, Oracle will establish relationships with as many of the current commercial customers of MySQL as they can and begin slowly trying to ease them onto other Oracle products. If the change doesn't cost much and if the Oracle product works (two big ifs), then customers won't care. Businesses aren't emotionally attached to databases and they'll probably feel better knowing they've got a future. Third, LAMP will live on and MySQL will be a part of it. Oracle won't completely kill MySQL because it makes them look good - in a "we support open source" kind of way. (A bit like General Motors touting its hybrid cars as part of their green image. "We don't sell very many, but we're doing our part to stop global warming. Meanwhile, how ‘bout a nice big SUV?") Finally, the one thing Oracle won't do is spend a lot of money managing the community or advancing the code base. There's no need - there's no competition, it's a pain to change databases and MariaDB will be years catching up (even though they will have the bulk of the community effort and talent). MySQL - in its present form - is done.

Answerman and Zippy in Chicago: Electronic Guard Dogs and Embezzling Fox Terriers

answerman — Thu, 28 May 2009 19:13:00 GMT

Dateline – May 27 Austin

Zippy and I just got back from the North American OEM Roundtable in Chicago. What a wonderful town! Great theater, great music, world class comedy (Second City – spawned a lot of talent for SNL), restaurants, shopping, museums, sports, scenery (we took a dinner cruise on Lake Michigan – the Chicago skyline at night is spectacular). It’s affordable (much less expensive than either coast), and absolute nirvana for a dog – the meat packing capital of the universe. Lots of drooling. It’s the third most populated city in the U.S. after New York and LA, but really doesn’t feel crowded. The secret to Chicago? Everything you want from a big city – without all the hassle, the attitude, or the cost.

We met with the OEMs for two days and got great feedback on our plans for PSQL. Two topics that really piqued interest were: Digital License Enforcement and finding better ways to sell the security products – in this instance AuditMaster.

Digital License Enforcement: Trust But Verify (and use an electronic guard dog)
If you’ve been reading the Insights newsletter, you’ve been getting hints of a shift in the way we implement licensing with Pervasive PSQL. Starting with Pervasive PSQL v10 and for future releases, Pervasive will employ technology that will help ensure the validity of copies of Pervasive PSQL generally, and in particular enforce license terms of one active installation per license. Prior to digital license enforcement, we had very few controls to limit copying and relied on customers’ common sense and good business ethics to not violate the terms of the license. We trusted everyone to do the right thing. And, mostly, they did (and do). Now, we’ve got technology that restricts the use of a license key to a single server (enforcing the terms of the software license agreement).

Why is this interesting to OEM customers? They’re selling software too. If an end user is making illegal copies of the database, you can bet they’re making illegal copies of the OEM application. By providing stronger controls over the licensing of the database, Pervasive is effectively giving the OEM the same protection for their software – any unlicensed copy of the OEM application would be rendered useless because the database couldn’t be activated. So there’s no reason to copy the OEM application. The really neat feature for the customer – they don’t have to do one thing to their application to take advantage of the added protection. Typical Pervasive embedded database approach – great technology infrastructure without the hassle. If you’ve installed a trial of PSQL v10.10 or purchased online, you’re already using digital license enforcement. If you didn’t notice the difference, that’s just fine with us.

Zippy Learns to Embezzle
The other really fun thing we got to do this month was to learn how to commit fraud with a popular ERP application. We built an AuditMaster demo for a vendor’s tradeshow – the goal was to convince resellers they needed to add AuditMaster to their repertoire. Given the right amount of access and application knowledge, a crafty person can cover their tracks well enough to make discovering “accounting irregularities” a very difficult task. We were able to change the name and address of a vendor, write ourselves a check, and change everything back so that the check registry had no record of any money going our direction. A cautious thief could go on for years before getting discovered because the standard reporting wouldn’t show anything amiss. Brilliant! And scary. In April, an article from Techworld pointed out that “six out ten employees stole company data after leaving their jobs, while McAfee calculated that the total economic losses from insider security breaches reached $1 trillion last year”. That’s a lot of potential risk – especially in a struggling economy where layoffs are rampant.

The great thing about AuditMaster is its ability to track things below the application – logging changes at a database table level – so that what’s invisible to the application can be seen using AuditMaster and a reporting tool. While you wouldn’t see these changes in the check registry (we covered our tracks), the record of name, address, and check description changes showed up clear as day with AuditMaster and Crystal reports. The big benefit was that the vendor’s resellers completely “got” AuditMaster because it was presented in a context they understood – as part of an application they sell every day. And that’s the thing that resonated most with the OEM’s in Chicago – great functionality, end user’s will struggle to implement it, but…give it to us as infrastructure so we can build it into our application and deliver the audit features as just another report (end users don’t care how it gets the information, just that the report is there) – and we’ll have a hit. One more example of the value of good, embedded data management (in this case security) tools – all the benefits of the enterprise stuff without all the hassle (or the price).

Chicago, NYC and Databases
I love NYC. But it’s work – you’ve got to embrace the noise, the pace, the cost – and you’ve got to cop a bit of a attitude to get things done (or just get where you’re going). Chicago, on the other hand, you can just arrive and enjoy. No rush, no fuss. Easy. Pervasive – we’re the Chicago of database management companies.

Lipstick, Pigs and Marketing

answerman — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 22:41:00 GMT

Dateline April Fool’s Day – Austin

I was in a meeting recently where a vendor was trying to save an account from moving to a competitor. The big issue was the usability of the software. Counterintuitive interface, frustrated users – classic anti-productivity tool. We’ve all been there. As a marketing person, I tend to notice phrasing, especially when it’s intended to cover obvious product flaws. (Remember Audi’s “unintended acceleration” as a way to describe an unsettling number of Audi owners somehow driving through their garages, store windows, etc?) The phrase in this case was “user experience challenges”. It made me smile and wince at the same time.

The vendor plan to help resolve the user experience challenges included a consolidation of support information, help, forums, knowledge bases enthusiastically named Customer Central. It’s going to have federated search capability to help users find all the answers they need to solve the problem they’ve got with the software. It’s great stuff, including the roadmap with the slides describing how the user experience is going to be fixed.

Unfortunately, all that effort is totally missing the point. The problem with the vendor’s product was not a lack of support, lack of available information or inexperienced users. It was a fundamental design flaw – or group of flaws. This is a tool used by marketing people, built by engineers and documented by technical writers. Massive perspective mismatch. Describing this mismatch as a user experience challenge and fixing it by aggregating a huge amount of content to be accessed with a nifty search engine won’t fix the basic problem. It sounds good and might even look good. Still lipstick on a pig. Expensive and time consuming lipstick. Still a pig.

Support Shift

There’s been a shift over the years in software product support. Long ago, when Zippy was a just a gleam in his great-great-great grandfather’s eye, you could buy a support contract that would deliver a person to your site to fix whatever was wrong (or even have them live there). You also got great big, detailed manuals. Costly but effective. For less money, you could call someone on the phone – marginally less timely but lots less expensive. Then came email support, built in help, online help, knowledge bases, community forums, social networks, and next…tweets (although I haven’t seen Twitter used for support yet, it's coming). The sources of support have become so diverse that a federated search engine is a “feature” to help users to get what they need. The important issue with this shift is that the burden of support has moved from the vendor to the user. That’s backwards and ridiculously expensive in terms of man hours required to deal with product problems.

To be fair, high speed networks, user forums, terminal services, etc. have all greatly improved the quality and lowered the cost of support for just about anything we use on a daily basis. Wouldn’t give any of it back. But…it has allowed companies to claim progress on improving their product when all they’re really doing is making it more fun for you to solve problems on your own.

Success by Design

I grew up with an architect as a dad. He definitely made me appreciate the value of things that were thoughtfully put together. The key to success, Dad always said, is to get the fundamentals right. Don’t just engineer, design and engineer. Think of some complex technology that’s been successful – it’s typically because the complexity was masked and great engineering made sure the design was well executed and the end product was reliable. My favorite examples are the iPhone and of course Pervasive PSQL.

Huge Customer Base, Tiny Support Staff – How do they do that?

Pervasive PSQL has thousands (maybe 10’s of thousands) of developers and literally millions of users. (This is what happens when you’ve been shipping a product for 25+ years.) We’ve also got active community forums, a great knowledge base and thorough documentation. Care to guess how big our support staff is? Six. Yep – just enough for a basketball team with one sub. A staff of 6 supremely talented support people who can answer the most arcane PSQL question faster than Zippy going after a breakfast taco. Most of them have been with Pervasive for 10 years and some for much longer. They’re also a pretty relaxed and friendly bunch – not the stereotypical antisocial “this product sucks, my customers are idiots, and I hate my job” employee accidents waiting to happen. That means the customer to support person ratio is something like (being really conservative here) several hundred thousand to one.

Believe this is possible just because we’ve got six smart support veterans and a great customer site with a federated search engine? I didn’t think so. That ratio only happens because Pervasive PSQL is a well designed, well engineered, constantly refined product that the vast majority of customers never worry about. For the developers who do work closely with PSQL and the end users who have it running their business applications, PSQL just works, and keeps on working. And that’s why, thank goodness, I don’t have to spend my time thinking up ways to put lipstick on a pig. No foolin’.

How 400 Years of Beer Brewing Monks Are Like Successful Software Companies: What We Learned from Our Latest Customer Meeting

answerman — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 22:04:00 GMT

Dateline February 20^th – Ettal, Germany

Pervasive just wrapped up its semi-annual international Distributor and OEM customer meeting at a nearly 700 year old monastery. In Ettal, a remote, small town in the Bavarian Alps. In winter, during a snow storm. The abbey is amazing. Started in 1330, the abbey grew and changed until a fire in 1744. It was then rebuilt in the Baroque style – lots of gold, amazing frescoes – just stunning. The brewery didn’t get going until 1609 which, if you’re checking, is 265 years before Budweiser was first brewed in the US – guess which tastes better? I can say from personal experience that after 400 years they’ve really gotten it right. Especially the dunkel. I’ve done considerable research in this area so I can say with some authority that Ettaler Kloster-Dunkle is world class dark beer.

How to Locate Your Customer Meetings

The great thing about meeting with customers in a place that’s off the beaten track, has great beer, and strong religious overtones is that conversations quickly get pretty frank. Nobody’s leaving (it’s snowing), everybody’s being forthright (it’s a monastery) and everybody’s pretty vocal (the beer’s excellent). This type of environment is tremendously conducive to great communications – we tell you what we’re doing and you tell us what you like (and don’t like). For a marketing guy, this is exactly why we have customer meetings.

The group was made up of companies who were all long time Pervasive PSQL and Btrieve users – some for 15+ years. These folks know the product; they know Pervasive and all have strong opinions – just the kind of interaction we want. We did get clear feedback from both Distributors and OEMs on the product, support, and marketing. One of the stronger messages was that we need to do more to make the brand stand out. Make sure people know how good Pervasive is in the embedded application database space.

Pervasive vs. The Big Guys

Successful brand marketing is sometimes a challenge since we’re competing against Sun, Microsoft, Oracle and IBM. All of which have tens of millions to spend on marketing and have PR teams bigger than my high school graduating class. All we’ve got for marketing is a few dollars, me and Zippy. But, like the Ettal monks, we’ve got something extra on our side - a lot of experience. (Ok, comparing 400 years of beer making with 25 years of software may be a stretch, but 25 years in the database business is a LONG time.) One of the benefits of longevity common to beer making and databases is financial stability - which is good for any brand.

Want an interesting comparison? Check out how well you would have done if you invested $1,000 in each of those companies (the database vendors, not the beer) at the beginning of 2008. Guess which was the best investment? Clue: this blog is written by the Pervasive Answer Man.

Results from $1,000 invested Jan 1, 2008 and sold Feb 24, 2009:

· JAVA ($683.45)

· MSFT ($511.36)

· ORCL ($211.98)

· IBM ($136.17)

· PVSW ($16.30)

Doesn’t matter how you look at it, in light of what’s been going on in the market the Pervasive investment with a mere 1.6% decline since 2008 is stellar performance. (Don’t you wish you could say that about your 401K?)

What Low TCO Really Means

Other interesting feedback we got was on the stability of PSQL v10. We can tell from the decline in support calls that it’s a stable release, but it’s even better to have that conversation face to face with a customer. One of the OEM’s moved to PSQL v9 in 2005. From 2005 to 2009 this OEM made 4 support calls – that’s less than one per year. This is from a customer who stresses the database a lot (i.e. not just an end user installing the software but a developer who’s making PSQL work for their particular application). Since they’ve moved to v10 – no support calls at all. Zip, nada, zero, zilch. Nothing says low total cost of ownership like zero support calls.

Our competitors – notably Microsoft and IBM - are spending a lot of money explaining low TCO in terms of how many hours of database admin time their tools save. This might make sense in an enterprise database context (I’m being charitable here) but totally misses the point when you’re talking about embedded application databases – where most customers don’t have an IT department much less a database admin. What’s really needed is *no* database administrator, *no* support overhead, and *low* license fees. That’s what we mean when we say low TCO.

So, the Pervasive PSQL database is a lot like successful beer brewing monks: It might not be flashy, it might not make you rich, but it’s a solid product and won’t cost a fortune in the meantime. Can’t ask for more than that.

Macworld 2009 Review

answerman — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 21:19:00 GMT

Dateline January 27^th – Austin

I like to let the events of a momentous trip (like the one Zippy and I just took to San Francisco for Macworld) sink in for awhile before putting thoughts to paper. Also, I’m a procrastinator. Macworld was very cool – even if Steve Jobs wasn’t able to give the keynote. There’s something about being part of an event where so many (think 10’s of thousands) true fans of a company and its products get together for a giant check-out-this-new-feature, new product, new color, new sound love fest. You just can’t not get fired up by that. And, as a veteran of a LOT of pure technology tradeshows – like several years of artificial intelligence conferences (beards and sandals and brave new world type stuff) – it’s great to be at a conference where people aren’t just going through the motions or just there to schmooze. The Apple faithful honestly dig the products, the company and all the bits and pieces that are part of the Apple Mac, iPod, iPhone ecosystem.

That said, Zippy and I were there to scout out possible ISV partners for PSQL on OSX. This means business applications - which might seem a little strange because Macworld has always been about the end user. With iPod and iPhone added to the mix it’s started to look a lot like a consumer products show – ear buds, speakers, luggage, skins, docking stations, batteries, fashionable silicone (not kidding) and lots of software for end users. Out of 400+ vendors there were 20 to 30 that had business applications. Also a fair number of e-commerce and pos applications for iPhone. Maybe 10 of the business applications were seriously into the small business space. Some using open source some using proprietary databases (do people still do that?) and one using d-base.

I think there’s a big opportunity here. Mac market share is going to continue to grow at the expense of Windows. So is Linux. Small businesses that are Mac centric are going to have less and less reason to touch Windows because the number and type of business application are going to grow on Macintosh and onto platforms that Windows just doesn’t fit into well (remember the POS applications on an iPhone). And…they’re going to need a small, fast, nearly unbreakable, easy to embed database that is maintenance free and doesn’t cost very much. Sound familiar?

In other news – It’s a small world and another example of why you want to keep your data secure.

One of the vendors I spoke with at Macworld was in the public eye recently – and not in a good way. Heartland Payment Systems is a US company that provides debit and credit card payment processing services. They announced Jan 20 that “unknown intruders had broken into its systems sometime last year and planted malicious software to steal card data carried on the company's networks.” There were potentially over 100 million cards compromised. Read the article in Techworld. That, friends and neighbors, is a catastrophic security breach. The kind that puts companies out of business. The company that launched the data privacy legislation movement, ChoicePoint, was fined $10M by the FTC for a breach involving 163,000 consumers and 800 cases of identity theft. Wonder what the fine is for 100 million cases?

If you've got customer data, protect it. If you're not already using AuditMaster then get to it. Download a trial or buy it online for only $495. It's the best investment in database security you'll ever make.

Meanwhile, promote the product/company/stuff you love. Be a fan. Wear the t-shirt, display the logo, join the club, add the background to your phone. Zippy and I have appointments at the tattoo parlor for judiciously placed PSQL logos. I'm told it stops hurting after a couple of days.

Adios 2008 - Predictions for 2009

answerman — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 18:33:00 GMT

Dateline Dec 31 – Austin, Texas

Season’s Greetings and Happy New Year everyone! Zippy and I enjoyed the last few days of 2008 recovering from a simply stupefying number of holiday parties with the requisite eating, drinking and general merrymaking. Zippy really digs this time of year because a) people who’ve been over eggnogged love to feed dogs some of whatever they’re eating, b) Zippy’s really cute so he gets fed a lot and c) he eats pretty much anything. It’s also fun to see how excited the little guy can get when faced with that many eating opportunities. Out of control doesn’t even begin to cover it – major damage to the Christmas tree (doesn’t like the needles – they hurt his feet) and a lot of present unwrapping. Considering that he’s working without opposable thumbs and using only lips, tongue and teeth, it’s an awesome display.

What’s not awesome about this time of year are fireworks – or more accurately, Zippy’s reaction to fireworks. Little, excited indoor dog doesn’t like loud unexpected noises and expresses his displeasure by a) peeing and/or b) chewing up something expensive and leather. Especially enjoys Bally, Ferragamo, watch bands - you get the idea. It’s all part of the charm of a long term relationship with man’s best friend.

2008 has been quite a year – godawful economic mess, fascinating (and the longest ever) presidential campaigns (Honestly, when’s the last time you paid a lot of attention to primaries?), hurricanes, government coups, pirates, the Olympics. It’s always interesting in the technology business – Yahoo and Microsoft (or not), Vista and now Windows 7, the ongoing growth of Apple, Linux, open source. Two of my favorites for the year – Bamboo laptop from Asus http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=5&l2=25&l3=859&l4=0&model=2696&modelmenu=1 Very cool, moderately expensive. Asus is obviously charging for the cachet of being green – but if enough people start buying, the price will go down (it always does). And it’s nice to support things that are sustainable. Just in case you want to go completely in the other direction and leave a big honkin’ carbon footprint , Asus also sells a Lamborghini branded laptop (for about twice as much). Product #2 – Flash Drive with built-in anti-virus - http://www.techworld.com/security/news/index.cfm?newsid=106021 Simple, smart, easy to use and makes perfect sense. I bet they sell a ton. I became a lifetime fan of SanDisk after I ran my Cruzer drive through a couple cycles in my washing machine and dryer. Still works fine. Amazing.

Other interesting stories – the impressive effect on spam volume related to the shutdown of some key hosting sites. For example, shutting down a single site, McColo, dropped spam volumes initially by 75% and subsequently by 33%. Since spam makes up somewhere between 70% and 80% of worldwide email traffic, shutting down the right hosting companies was an awesome display of leverage and freed up a lot of infrastructure for better things. Makes you wonder what took so long.

The theme here is that Zippy and I dig things that are simple, sustainable, make sense – and as a result are cool. Kind of by definition. Like PSQL database products – easy to use, direct, really affordable and pretty much bullet proof. We also love marketing and watching for the next big thing.

And that brings us to the 2^nd half of this blog: Predictions for 2009.

Economy – It’s going to get worse before it gets better but we’ll be on the road to recovery by summer. Bailout/Stimulus Package total – just south of 3 trillion $. Cash will continue to be king. The philosophy of reuse, reduce, recycle will rule. $25B is not going to be enough to save the big 3. Gas will not stay this affordable.

Pervasive – Expect some surprising news about an old, old friend. We'll see 5 new OEMs for PSQL on Mac OS-X and an ongoing growth of Macintosh business applications. You’re going to be really glad you upgraded to PSQL v10 when your customer start to move to 64-bit and multi-core hardware. Somebody, somewhere (a lot of somebodies in fact) will save a lot of money because they were using AuditMaster, Backup Agent and DataExchange. Some people will continue to do crazy things at work and Mother Nature will remind us all (again) why we have backup systems.

Sports – Giants win the Super Bowl. Lewis Hamilton will repeat as Formula 1 champion. Chicago Cubs will win the World Series – and the city will be swallowed whole by the earth when a previously undetected tectonic plate has a massive shift directly under Wrigley Field.

Celebrity and Politics – Oprah will lose 100 lbs, and gain it back, and lose it again. The Obama’s will get 2 dogs. Neither of them will be as cool as a Toy Fox Terrier (Zippy). Brittany Spears will get married, and go into rehab. Al Franken will become the newest senator from Minnesota (not a surprise from the same place that elected a WWF celebrity to the governorship). Michael Jackson will remain in the news and he won’t get any more normal.

Personal – As a result of a freak laboratory accident, Zippy’s mental capacity will increase tenfold. The results will be both surprising and terrifying.

Buckle up! It's going to be an interesting year.

Windows 7 - Don't Worry, Be Happy

answerman — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 22:37:00 GMT

Dateline Austin - November 17

Heard about Windows 7? Who hasn’t by now – it’s all over the blogosphere and trade mags. Beta reportedly scheduled for December, release sometime late in 2009. Oh boy, you’re thinking. Another operating system. Super – and this just after I finished worrying about Vista.

It’s not a problem. Here’s why. (This takes a bit of reading – pay attention and try to keep up)

Vista hasn’t been the success that Microsoft was hoping for – that you can still get XP on new systems pretty much says it all. Every now and again, big successful companies pull a “New Coke”. Remember New Coke? It was going to create a whole new market of Coca Cola drinkers (This was in 1985 – so if it was before you were born and this analogy makes no sense at all, go read about it in Wikipedia.) Instead, it pissed off a lot of people who loved Coke the way it was, didn’t want a change – you know, soft drink luddites. Short story – new coke fizzled (pardon the pun), coke classic was (re) introduced, and Coca Cola went back to dominating the soft drink universe and over-caffienating teenagers (Until the arrival of Red Bull – which is another story altogether. Tastes like cr*p – made billions.)

Vista is kind of like New Coke – newer, better, shinier, safer (except it actually has useful features – not just more sugar) – and a new name. Some people love it, most don’t care, and some hate it. Great promise – under delivered.

Here’s the good news – Microsoft didn’t get to be a great big software company by making the same mistake twice. In a row. So you can bet Windows 7 (note the change back to the traditional naming conventions – can’t slip anything by those Microsoft marketing people) is going to have all the good stuff Vista had, plus some more, and without the things we didn’t like – poor driver support, slow to launch, memory pig, etc. And, they’re going to make really sure everything works the first time – including backward compatibility. The great thing about following a release that was less than a success is that it focuses your attention on really nailing the next one. Much less likely to over sell, too. If you’re curious about what’s happening with Windows 7 – check out the Microsoft Engineering Blog.

Here’s the rest of the good news – if you’ve got PSQL v10 (which we released for Vista and Server 2008), then you know your application is going to be fine on Windows 7. If you’re waiting until Windows 7 because you don’t want to go through this twice – stop waiting. Unless you’re running an absolutely ancient OS, PSQL v10 will work with what you’ve got. And…we’ve added a few things that will make the change worthwhile no matter what OS you’re running – XIO (improves i/o performance on 32-bit applications) and 64-bit support (so you can put your whole dataset into RAM) are two that come to mind. So just do it already.

Just in case you’re wondering how we have so much institutional knowledge (and strong opinions) on marketing software versions and how that relates to cola – think back to Pervasive.SQL 2000. We went from Btrieve 6.15 (awesome) to Pervasive.SQL 7 (that change was related to creating the new company “Pervasive”, going public, adding a SQL engine etc.). Then, in a fit of millennia fever, we named the next release Pervasive.SQL 2000. Then 2000i. Ugh. The next release (v8) was awesome – and back to the original naming convention – v9 then v10. Throughout all of those releases we’ve been pretty much in lock step with Microsoft operating systems. And we’ve maintained fantastic backward compatibility. We’re still on a roll. Everybody slips – good companies learn from it. And you, lucky customer get the long term benefit.

Stay tuned. We’ll let you know when we start testing with Windows 7. Expect a boring, but comforting – “It works just fine” report.

It's Vegas Baby!

answerman — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 21:01:00 GMT

Dateline October 14 – Las Vegas

Vegas. This place always amazes me – middle of the desert, neon everywhere, absolutely no reason to exist except to feed our (apparently) insatiable appetite for gambling, drinking, and, um, whatever…. The scale and the scope of kitsch, garishness, and the generally tacky have to be seen to be believed. Looks great from the air (at night) and even interesting close up, but you’d have a screaming fit if anything remotely similar was plunked down next to your gated subdivision.

Awesome place for conventions, though. Zippy and I were attending an Eloqua user group meeting at the Rio. Eloqua’s the company that has made millions hosting software for “demand generation, marketing automation” email. It’s a pretty cool application and Eloqua has done a great job of moving the industry forward, including an appropriate amount of thought put into best practices and legitimate use of the software - so it's not just automating spam. Plus, they throw a great happy hour (I mean “reception”). VooDoo Lounge – 51^st floor roof – fantastic views.

The trick to the demand generation marketing automation thing is to get the right message to the right audience –and in a timely fashion. Las Vegas casinos are spectacularly good at identifying the target customer, putting them into a group, and getting more money out of them. It’s all about getting you into the casino, keeping you there, and keeping you gaming. Limos at the airport (unless you’re a really big roller and they send you a jet), VIP check in lines, club passes on the casino floor, comped buffets and rooms, free drinks when you’re gambling . It never stops. The software industry, on the other hand, sends newsletters, product announcements, press releases, and the occasional iPod contest emails. Honestly, if software transactions were as engaging as a typical casino/customer relationship we’d all be bazillionaires by now. (And probably chain smoking insomniac alcoholics.)

What’s the Point…or How is a Pervasive Customer Like a Vegas VIP?

How on earth does this all relate to Pervasive and Pervasive customers? Being a Pervasive customer isn’t exactly like partying in Vegas, but at least your chances of making money are considerably higher the longer you’ve been in the relationship. (In Las Vegas, even with house odds on a simple game like blackjack hovering around .3%, sooner or later you’re going to lose.) And, we love all of our customers because we know how hard they are to get and who else is trying to attract them. Sun, Microsoft, Oracle – in other words, really big companies with really big marketing budgets. However, we do have some customers that are more VIP than the average Pervasive VIP – the OEM’s. These are software companies with contracts to buy PSQL directly from Pervasive in volume. They often embed the database into an application before shipping it to the end user. Just like casinos catering to the big spenders, we really work hard to keep this group of customers happy. (This includes creating custom versions of PSQL so that they can sell to brand new markets – See Sept 18 and Sept 30 postings).

New Stuff for OEM’s

To make life easier for OEM’s, Pervasive recently added a feature to PSQL that allows the OEM to embed a library (DLL) into their application to dynamically generate a license key when the whole thing (OEM application and PSQL database) is installed. OEMs are unique in that they can generate license keys and report back to us so we can calculate royalties (that they pay us according to their contract). With the new DLL’s, OEM’s can generate keys at install – and make it specific to the install that’s happening at that time (e.g. user count, OS, etc.). The OEM has more control over licensing and it’s a big time saver over the previous manual process. And that - saving time and being in charge - is what being a VIP is all about.

To learn more about this feature and all kinds of other interesting news, check out this month's newsletter. It will arrive in your in box in about 2 weeks.

What else could possibly go wrong.....?

answerman — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 21:12:00 GMT

Dateline October 2 - Austin

It’s been an interesting few weeks. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac get nationalized, sort of. We’re all now, as part owners of AIG, in the insurance business. Merrill Lynch gets sold and Lehman Brothers sinks beneath the waves. Congress fails to pass a $700 billion Hail Mary (sorry, I just can’t resist the puns) legislation and the Dow loses a record 777 points in a day. The Wilshire 5000 index, which measures the performance of all publicly traded companies in the US, lost $1,000,000,000,000 (that’s one trillion) on the same day. It’s a number that staggers the imagination and, in context, makes a $700B “rescue” somehow look reasonable – go figure. All of this comes on the heels of Hurricane Ike demolishing most of Zippy and my favorite part of the Gulf Coast – namely Galveston Island, and in particular, the Balinese Room (great restaurant and bar, and up until the 50’s, great gambling den). We love tiki.

The point in this discussion is that there are some things you can plan for (relaxed lending standards and lots of subprime loans in a heated real estate market are gonna eventually be a problem for somebody) and some things you can’t (the Balinese survived several hurricanes, economic downturns, raids by the Texas rangers and gets clobbered by a storm originally heading to South Texas – hundreds of miles away).

So…what’s your risk management plan? How are you going to protect your business, your data, and your customers from a major crisis? Can’t really protect them from a global financial meltdown, but you’d look like a fool in this day and age if you didn’t have remote backups of data in case of your own Hurricane Ike, or Hurricane Zippy (who can chew through a power cord faster than a Makita jigsaw). If you’ve ever had to try and recover or, worse, recreate data after a loss, you already know that the cost of the software to manage the problem in the first place seems like a ridiculously good deal right about then.

If you don’t already have solutions, definitely check out Backup Agent and DataExchange – two products that can really keep your data safe and your business running. They’re cheap insurance and simple to use.

Meanwhile, enjoy Fall wherever you are. It’s the best time of year for weather in Texas (finally not crazy hot) – and it’s football season, when entire small towns empty out on Friday nights (creates another interesting risk management scenario), and about 100,000 people dress up in burnt orange every other weekend or so here in Austin. I look awful in orange and Zippy don’t do clothes. Excellent at tailgates though.

Let’s be careful out there.

Why We Love Mac OS X - Part Deux

answerman — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 20:41:00 GMT

Dateline September 30 - Austin

As promised, here's Zippy's translation of the Info Week Article. Keep in mind, he's a slow typist (I had to spend a lot of time correcting errors.) and his concept of "timely" varies - typical dog, always chasing butterflies or chewing through a pair of really comfortable shoes instead of meeting deadlines.

For a more professional commentary on the Abacus deal - check out the Pervasive Press release.

Abacus Research ERP Software for Apple

Abacus discovers the Apple market, both server and client side as well as the iPhone.

The Swiss business application vendor Abacus Research today announced that the 2009 version of its ERP software will work in a pure Apple environment (availability scheduled for Fall 2009). In addition to a server side OS X version, Abacus adapted 450 modules of their ERP suite for Mac on the desktop. Close collaboration between Abacus and Pervasive Software resulted in PSQL being brought to the Mac OS X server, and the desktop modules were easily moved to the Mac because they were originally written in Java.

According to Abacus CEO Claudio Hintermann, this step towards Apple brings Abacus customers more freedom of choice – now they can choose between Windows, Linux, and Mac platforms. With this move, Abacus is reacting to changing markets and customer demand. The Mac version clearly provides an advantage when attacking the neighboring German market, since there’s definitely a lack of good ERP software on the Mac platform.

Why We Love Macs and OS X

answerman — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 14:06:00 GMT

Dateline Sep 18, 2008 – Somewhere in Switzerland

Who doesn’t have a soft spot in their heart for a Mac? It’s the easiest to use, slickest designed, loved by right brained people everywhere computer. Nothing like the market share of Windows, but Macs (and Apple) do have their niches, and Apple continues to come up with industry making products and just plain gorgeous industrial design. Why, you wonder, am I yammering on about Mac’s when Pervasive is a dedicated Windows database company?

It’s because last week I saw PSQL v10 running on a MacBook Air. No kidding. And not just running in a parallel Windows environment – running native on OS X. Very, very cool. It’s a miracle you say? Nope. Just an innovative Pervasive customer taking advantage of the fact that there’s already a Linux version of PSQL, and a responsive Pervasive management and engineering team that was more than happy to port a version of PSQL from Linux to Mac OS X. Since Mac OS X is based on Unix (and derived from BSD), most software written for BSD or Linux can be recompiled to run on Mac OS X. I’m not crazy enough to say something like “simple recompile” (which in my book rates up there with “the check’s in the mail” and “we’re from the government and we’re here to help”), but the basics were there.

We got the request from Abacus Research AG, a long time partner and ERP applications vendor in St. Gallen, Switzerland. They’ve been a tremendous success in the SMB ERP arena and were looking to expand their market to include customers like architects, designers, media firms – in other words, creative people – businesses that typically use nothing but Macs. Abacus saw a lot of unmet demand for good business applications in Mac only shops and approached Pervasive for help.

The cool thing about working with a database company smaller than say, Oracle or some division of Sun Microsystems, is that it doesn’t take long to get in touch with people who can really make decisions and take action. So Abacus had a chat with Gilbert van Cutsem – the database division general manager – about putting PSQL on Mac OS X. Gilbert had a discussion with the Engineering team, and it was off to the races. Pervasive Engineering got the work done in less than a month. Now Abacus has a brand new market it can sell to, and we’ve got a happy OEM customer. Check out their press release at: http://www.abacus.ch/unternehmen/news/news/article/508/2/. I’ll post a Zippy-translated version of an InfoWeek article as soon as he gets done typing. (He’s got some German Sheperd somewhere in his past, so the translation is mostly ok, but his typing is atrocious.)

Is Pervasive going to ship a Mac OS X version of PSQL? Too early to tell. But – if your business might benefit from expanding your market into Mac only shops, give us a call. We’d love to hear from you and we can probably help. Check out Pervasive PSQL on Mac OS X for more information. Besides, if it gets me and Zippy to places like St. Gallen in the summer (and out of the Texas heat), we’re all for it.

p.s. Guess what Zippy’s favorite new breakfast snack is? Mac and……Swiss. I know, I know – it’s cheesy. Blame the dog.

The Pervasive Answerman is Here

answerman — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 21:24:00 GMT

Dateline September 16 – Austin, Texas

Hello and welcome to the first of many blogs from me, the Pervasive Answerman – and my faithful sidekick, Zippy the Pervasive Answerdog. That's us in the picture on the right.

What am I about? Pervasive hired me to keep you, dear customer, informed and up to date on any number of topics – everything you need to know about the PSQL database, related products like AuditMaster, Backup Agent, DataExchange, important news at Pervasive and to answer the occasional random (but often considered) questions from readers like “Why is the sky blue?” or “What should I have for lunch?”. Plus, Zippy is going to chime in, when he's in the mood, to keep you up to speed with why dogs are fashionable (and not just tail wagging eating machines). It’s all about learning useful things and being entertained along the way.

If you haven’t been to our site yet, go check it out at http://www.pervasiveanswerman.com. Zippy and I spent a lot of time answering some key questions about Pervasive and otherwise unlocking the secrets of the universe. Do it today. You’re going to learn something important. Really.

Here’s the deal: As long as readers continue to ask questions, I’ll have the answers – my tested IQ is high enough to make the average Mensa member look like a well trained chimp – and, more importantly, Pervasive will keep sending those checks and Zippy gets to keep eating. So, visit the site, send me a question or two, and keep the dog from a life of crime.