James, I can't give you an end-all, be-all argument or reason for RB over M$ Access or SQL Server. No insult intended to anyone who mentioned that RB was the first truly relational (PC?) database, but that esoterica really is irrelevant. What is relevant is anything related to resource consumption, namely time, labor, and money (okay, everything ultimately equates to money, but, w/re: to money, there is at minimum, an initial outlay of capital and ongoing expenses to design, construct, operate, and maintain a system).
However, working in a university research group myself, I can ONLY endorse RBase, not because it's the only choice, but because it's often the only correct choice. Even though our campus license agreements allowed us Access for FREE and the various levels of SQL Server for greatly reduced prices, RBase licensing was still MOST reasonable, especially for educational institutions. Okay that deals with initial outlays ; 'nuf said, as the situation could vary by the scale of an organization. Now, for the meat and bones of this. I am basically a one-person I/T shop for The Sparks Bureau of Business & Economic Research at The University of Memphis. We do lots of survey-based research, mostly for performance evaluation, on behalf of state and local government clients. There is also a lot of policy-level work, but that rarely involves me (or RBase) unless there is data manipulation required beyond something simple, such as importing records or text into a spreadsheet or word processor. We also perform certain custom reporting functions for these governmental clients using extracts from their systems - large sets of production data are the typical fare here - which they apparently cannot get approved and/or funded in-house. The "point-of-the-spear", as it were, for our group is cadre of social science researchers, most all with terminal-degrees - yep', there is a definitie implication of a non-quantifiable resource-consumption-multiplier in my use of "terminal-degree" - meaning that they often fail to understand that the what, how, where, when, and who of their various projects is gonna' make both my life harder and everything cost more. Their academic areas are economics, sociology, and education - I was Latin & German, then added MIS/TELCOM, and an MBA, so I'm "out-hierarchied", but, especially as I haven't always been in education, I hope that I understand something of the "real world". However, my colleagues' level of understanding about organizational management is all-too-often suspect ; their general understanding of I/T and the role it can play with appropriate allocation and utilization of resources (labor, software, hardware) is tantamount to that old Dilbert on my door : "So, how soon can you build the Cloak of Invisibility?" Initially, I tried to "toe the line", using Access and/or SQL Server. I hated Access, realizing quickly that if I were going to be able to do anything with these products, it'd have to be in SQL Server. I didn't dislike SQL Server ; in fact, I found that there some shared similarities between it and RBase. However, I quickly discovered that it was WAY TOO MUCH for us (well, me) to handle, adminisratively/maintenance-wise and much of this was due to features that offered us little or no utility/value, definitely a case of over-kill. Additionally, I was gonna' have to go deep into learning VB, re-learning C++, or something else, in order to develop an app' for the front-end, as well as the details of SQL Server. Again, I was and am one person, with operational deadlines. So, I went back to good ol' RBase. I knew what it could do. I knew what I could do with it. So, I might just be able to make some of those deadlines. Well, lo' and behold, it happened just that way. There have been fits and starts. I've lost hair at an accelerated rate. We(I) still have a long way to go. However, had I been forced to stick with M$ tools, I would have left or been dismissed, as management would not even entertain the discussion of additional labor resources and/or training, which would have been a sine qua non had we gone the M$ route. I would have had to spend so much time learning that couldn't have done the work, but, without the learning, the work couldn't have been done. When I arrived, there were approximately 2.5 FTE's, 4-6 G/A's, and several more student-workers, all associated/connected in some way with I/T. Access was free and SQL Server was licensed. However, no demonstrable value was being derived from the consumption of these resources. In other words, I/T wasn't doin' much of nothin', except burning money ; this was the view of the Director at the time and I agreed with him. Today, there is myself, one highly-skilled G/A (who has returned for a PhD after almost 10 years at Fortune 500 firms working primarily in networking/telecommunications infrastructure - I'd be dead w/o him, because any depth I had in that area is dated and probably no longer applicable, so I'm hoping he takes a long time to graduate), and one student worker (she handles almost 100% of the data entry). We have assumed responsibility for many more functions on many more projects than at any time in the past. Accuracy has improved, cycle-times are shorter, and less labor is required. Quality is up and costs are down. That's a helluva' value proposition. My immediate superior even said, "You've shown us things with the data that we've never seen before." RBase has been there all the way, even if I'm still on 6.5++. And, admittedly, it's not just the tool, but also the operator (not trying to pat myself on the back), who, using a capable tool properly, can make good things happen. RBase may or may not be perfect. I know that I'm not - there are still enough "holes", bugs, delays in response-time, and other problems in my app's to keep me busy with analysis, debugging, re-factoring, etc for some time. However, I wouldn't even be writing this LONG response had I not been able to attack the problem using RBase as my big stick. Nor would this organization be enjoying the benefits that it doesn't even care to quantify without rapid delivery of what I could do with RBase. So, I never leave home without it ... even though I only live 1.5 miles "as the crow flies" from my office. I know that there is no cold, hard, fast, quantifiable, objective reason for choosing RBase herein. Hopefully, there is no wistful, romantic, nostalgic sentiment about RBase, either. However, I hope that there is some value in this anecdotal argument for RBase, at the least since it's from a management-minded, objective-driven, I/T person working in a resource-constrained publicly-funded university environment. Oh, you might tell your decision-makers that, if they go to the trouble and expense (and waiting) of training of developing good M$ developers, any of 'em that are really worth a damn, are gonna' be more expensive than your institution is likely to be able to afford, so they'll leave for higher-paying jobs as soon as they can find 'em. If they believe you on this, be ready to stand against their fallback position of, "Let's just get some students in here - their all computer whizzes anyway." Please remind them that utilization of student labor (as a surrogate for "real-world" professionals) is even a "worser-case" scenario. They lack the life-experience necessary to have a sufficiently broad view of what they're doing. Their availability is limited. Their focus is divided by all the accoutrements of life at college. They're guaranteed to be short-lived in their employment, so each successive generation will re-invent the I/T wheel re-invented by the previous (graduating) generation - documentation is just something they talked about in a class last semester. Now, I'm not down on them, per se, but, considered from an objective, management perspective, why would you hire someone, who is under-skilled, under-focused, under-paid, under-pretty_much_everything to do a job which might be SUPER-critical to the organization. Well, I could go on, but trust that I speak from experience. What I'm gettin' at here is, if the job's worth doin', it's worth doin' right. Of course, that's gonna' cost you something. It's my opinion that, at least in my university research group environment, doin' the job right has cost a lot less in both the short-run and the long-run by going the RBase way rather than the M$ way. Of course, it's a bit "academic", as the job wouldn't have been done at all going the M$ way. Oh, and if you do utilize students along the way, they just might learn something more about databases, SQL, etc, by using RBase rather than by using any other tool. That's how I got started, just before the release of System V. And yep', won't be long 'til I finally have the chance to move to 7.x, but, I guess I should go back to work now, before the taxpayers revolt, or a researcher, fearless with opinion, decides to exclude zeroes (that were over 50% of all the responses) from the calculation of a mean, considering them NULL's or some other missing data value ... FWIW, my $0.02, Steve Wills SBBER/CMS University of Memphis ----- Original Message ----- From: "james hageman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "RBASE-L Mailing List" <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, May 19, 2005 2:09 PM Subject: [RBASE-L] - Rbase v. Access > I am finding myself being required to justify the use of Rbase instead > of Access at this Univ. Apparently just saying it's way better, see for > yourself doesn't cut it. > > I am looking for some help in examples of why Rbase is better and that > is does use a real programming language and a list of major > organizations that are using rbase. I know Razzak is doing work for the > FBI and believe the US Navy. Others? > > Thanks much. >
