' ... we've had two problems with achieving the time scales of the plan. One there was a major problem on the system, a technical problem whereby the PC would lose its connection to the database. It would only happen in remote sites. So for example we have a database server in New York and the people in L.A. and Chicago access that database over a router network. The people in New York weren't having any problems in losing connection, but the people in L.A. and Chicago were. The same thing in this country. And for some reason it started to happen frequently.X022 page 002.01 (tape 01.1.03) Gordan Notes/Trans/Tape 27/01/94We got Sybase in and they couldn't solve it, and they said it was our network. We've got a standard network, ... and they basically washed their hands of it, which was really disappointing. I've generally been very disappointed with Sybase's support.
With hindsight, when we were looking at Sybase and Oracle, I always felt more comfortable with Oracle because they are a bigger company in this country and have more people on support and the development of the product actually happens in this country. Whereas Sybase is a very American company with limited presence in Europe, and I think we lost out on the support side.
So, it got to the stage ... where I threatened and said if you don't sort this out, we're going to throw this all away and put Oracle in, because that is the idea of this technology, you can wheel one SQL database in and another out. I know it is not as simple as that but I gave them an ultimatum and they got engineers over from the States and we looked at it. Because obviously this is a big market for them potentially with clients in the market sector, so if we slapped it all over Computing and PC Week, that X-Group had kicked it out it wouldn't do their image any good.
So to cut a long story short, that problem was solved. The problem was that when we were in Sybase, we're running Novell and Novell comms protocol ... is a bit fragile and by running a Unix comms protocol ... it all seems to work fine. It cost us about £10,000 to put this disk there, this comms protocol in every PC but it solved the problem. ... And it all worked alongside all the other PC applications they use, that was the main thing we had to test out.
It took so long to solve that problem, in the meantime one of the other guys on the team found a way of trapping it, so at least they only got an error message rather than the PC crashing. So I stopped all development for about two weeks and got them to put those traps in right throughout the system. Because I wasn't confident that we were going to solve the problem, the underlying problem and I didn't think Sybase would be able to solve it. They seemed to be really struggling. So, everybody kind of stopped and put these traps in everywhere which at least made the thing more acceptable to the user. Because the system was starting to lose credibility rapidly, as a result of this. ... But of course we lost a couple of weeks work as a result of that. ... virtually the whole team got involved in it. ... '
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© Clare Tagg 2000