> On Wednesday 28 March 2007 07:56, Michael Christie wrote: >> The main reason we haven't installed a backup spare server is the cost >> of the SQL licence in our case Gupta SQL. The licence costs a couple of >> thousand dollars in itself. This is in addition to the hardware, and >> installation etc etc. > > Once again an excellent reason why to put the thumb screws onto vendors to > allow FOSS SQL servers, eg Firebird (as Argus does), MySQL or PostgreSQL. > > Especially the latter is very mature, and beats most commercial offerings (Bar > perhaps Oracle) in terms of features, scalability an reliability > > Most FOSS SQL servers nowadays allow replication in either peer or > master-slave mode, or database shadowing - which wold allow people to have a > stand-by server with *CURRENT* data without needing to restore a backup when > the primary server caught fire - and all at zero license costs, zero > restrictions re number of seats, connections, users etc. > > I for my part can only wonder at the stupidity of sticking with MS SQL and > paying through the nose for something that can be had MUCH better for free
Hi Horst, This is all fine if you're starting from scratch, but the vendors with approximately 95% of the Australian GP/Specialist market have products that date back into the early-mid nineties. Unlike now, I doubt there was as much separation between the database and development environments back in the day, or any quality FOSS SQL servers. Even if these "legacy" vendors did the programming to allow mysql/postgres/firebird to be used instead of proprietary database applications, the task of migrating practices and supporting dozens of extra combinations (SQL flavour x clinical software version) would be huge and the payoff to the vendors negligible. Regards, Simon _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
