I'm traying to find download for FTS but can't. Where is it or what happened to FTS?

Pervasive killed it.

FTS was removed a long time ago.  The product never gained wide acceptance.

Jose Pruneda

jpruneda:

The product never gained wide acceptance.

I just love this line. (No offense intended to Jose -- this jab is intended towards the decision-makers.)

The product was available for the brand new PSQLv9 engine only.  Strangely, although we have been telling Pervasive for a LONG time that it takes existing application developers at least a year to test their application fully with a new version, migrate all of their users to that new version, and only THEN start using any new product feature, they continue to release products and then let them die off much more quickly than that.

It seems like Pervasive is developing applications for the internal developer only.  An internal developer, maintaining one application for a single company, can easily see a new feature and decide to jump all over it, building sample code, getting it to work, and then getting the production system upgraded.  However, only about 10% of my customers are end-user developers, and many of them even take longer than a year to plan new upgrades due to the amount of system testing required..

Most others are independent software vendors (ISV's) who have an installed customer base in the hundreds.  Obviously, developers cannot start using a new feature until all users are on the new version that supports that feature.  However, it can easily take a year or two (or even more) to properly upgrade several hundred end-user sites, and during the time, the feature offers promises only.  It is only AFTER the users get upgraded that developers can finally start using the new feature.  However, they often find, then, that the capability has been eliminated or deprecated.

Should developers be more nimble?  Probably, YES!  However, this costs time, and time is money, right?  It just amazes me how decisions are made about this product line...

But perhaps I have been a bit ranty lately...
 

Bill,

I am with you.

In my opinion the life cycles of Pervasive in general are much too short. In productive surroundings it is not the best way to use new versions before the first or better second service pack is available. The latest hotfix for 9.52 is only some weeks old, and if I read about your problems with 10.x I will take much time to upgrade... With every upgrade of the database in the past (from 2000i to 8, from 8 to 9) there were indeed several severe problems.

Of course I understand that Pervasive cannot live mainly from new customers, so they have to get money from current customers. But in my opinion this is not the right way. Maybe Pervasive does not understand that the upgrade costs are one thing (which is expensive enough), but the costs for upgrading are much higher because of weeks or months for test times, many problems in the company, if something does not work in productive surrounding like in test scenarios and so on.

In our experience we had to downgrade in case of our installation of 8.5 (after weeks we got several hotfixes which were than included in 8.7), and we had to downgrade from 9 to 8.7 (in this case we got hotfixes as well). In both cases our company had many problems because nearly 100 people could not work!

Especially if you compare support cycles from Pervasive with for example MS Server, than there is a big difference.

Greetings

Ronald