Getting out...

[Thorsten Hohage]

Hi Jeff,

On 2008-02-11, at 23:00, Jeff Justice wrote:

> Well folks, I'm jumping ship from Valentina to RealSQLServer.  In 7  
> months of trying to get Valentina Server installed, trying to get  
> Valentina Studio to work without crashing, and trying to understand  
> the quirky installation, execution, and documentation, enough is  
> enough.


well everybody made his own kind of "scoring" and so your and my view  
may varying.

BUT I worked withe nearly every Big Boy out in the DB market

	 Oracle, Sybase, DB2, MS SQL, mySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLLight, FrontBase,  
OpenBase,

of course some of them back in 1998 and other still today.


And if I'm allowed to give only one conclusion, I must say:

	No DB is perfect and all have their minor or major issues and in most  
cases you'll find them, after 6 Month of usage.

So NOW you know the current "issues" with Valentina, but are you sure  
you know everything about RealSQLServer? Think about it, REAL is ways  
more restrictive on discussing the cons and issues of their products,  
then Valentina is! You just downloaded the RealSQLServer and looked at  
it the first day! What happens if in production 20 people connects at  
the same time?


I must admit I simply didn't used the RealSQLServer, because I always  
need to use multi-user-db and for me SQLLight is simply a single user  
db. There is a facade in front of, but this is the same like using an  
application server in front of any other persistence layer. IMHO there  
is a hugh difference between a real multi-user-db and a "storage  
engine" that could be used by more then one user.


I didn't know you and nothing about your company. But only looking at  
two points your mentioned:


* Installation / concept of VServer Office on Mac OS X:

Of course it would be nice if this could be a "real service", but I  
missed nothing and I deployed it several times for a production system  
running on Mac OS X. While it's not perfect, it's simply a fact like  
it is, learn how to start it ( in the Terminal - when developing(!) ),  
and that's it.

There are several more cases where the server-machine needs a reboot  
or crashes for other reasons, then a crashed VServer had been  
reactivated by launchd. Except for testing a new beta (of my app or  
VServer) there was never a VServer crash in production (knock on wood!)


In contrast, did you ever install an Oracle server ;-)?



* VStudio crashing

Yes VStudio crashes from time to time. In most cases when using it as  
a developer and testing new and uncommon queries. But if I report this  
error, a) Ivan told me how to do it in the Valentina way and why I  
make a mistake and b) the fix is only days away, at least.

I'm, still be able to crash FrontBase with a simple Excel-Sheet and  
ODBC, all though I reported the error years ago. Or this "nice" error  
Sybase was not able to fix, due to summer holidays. ... Last week I  
crashed the Oracle SQLDeveloper 4 times a day!


But when using one of the stable versions (and they get better from  
version to version) for my common day work, it's not more or less  
buggy then any other tool!.



But at Valentina you will find the most responsive support team I've  
ever experienced, a really helpful mailing list, where the support  
team itself is even present. I clearly prefer to use Valentina, enjoy  
the work with the stuff and try to help to give products the last  
polishing instead of jumping on a new boat and being in the risk of  
sinking in some weeks.


regards

Thorsten Hohage
--
objectmanufactur.com - Hamburg,Germany