Case Study

CodeBase to Apollo

Author: David Tessitore, Senior Programmer
Company: Federal Aviation Administration

I was working as a consultant/programmer for the largest travel agency in Orlando, Florida, Global Travel International using Visual C++ and Sequiters' CodeBase database engine to develop my software. The travel agency had a two year old DOS FoxBASE program and my job was to covert it to Windows keeping all existing data in tact.

After one month of programming, the software was ready release. The company was excited because the FoxBASE program was not working properly, so at that point anything would have been better. After copying the required CodeBase DLLs to each user's computer, creating icons on the users desktop and placing the .EXE and data files on the network, everything was in place. The travel agency decided to switch all 50 employees to my new program the following day.

The next day came with no joy. Within five minutes, the complaints came rushing in. Users were seeing sharing violations, CodeBase error messages like "cannot read file", CodeBase error this, CodeBase error that...I was mortified! Everyone looked at me, especially the operations manager, and asked "What is going on?!" I replied, " I am working on it".

I thought my career as a programmer was over.

Apollo SDE to the rescue

After viewing my source code, everything seemed to be correct so the problem seemed to be CodeBase and not my code. I needed to do something fast because the company needed this program ASAP and the pressure started to mount. Lucky for me I designed a database object (class wrapper) that encapsulated all of the CodeBase functions.

Since I had problems with the CodeBase engine and did not have a good experience with their tech support, I had already researched an alternative ironically weeks earlier. The alternative was the Apollo SDE data engine. I had planned on eventually learning Apollo SDE and comparing it to CodeBase.

I was not familiar with any of the Apollo SDE functions so I read the help file and was surprised to be up and running in 15 minutes. The engine's API looked like it was easy to use and since I created a C++ object wrapper for CodeBase , I spent the next few hours converting my C++ object wrapper to use Apollo SDE, removing all references to CodeBase. I replaced and learned all of the functions of the SDE database library in a few hours. Later that evening, I was ready to test the new version of my software with the new Apollo SDE database engine. I copied the Apollo SDE DLLs to the hard drive and copied the newly compiled C++ .EXE to my network. Everything was ready to test.

Without hesitation, I clicked on the icon to run my program and it worked. I then quickly went to three other workstations and ran the new program at each station. Almost simultaneously after the main menu was displayed, I did a search on all three workstations and PRESTO, IT WORKED! I WAS ASTONISHED! Before I allowed myself to get more excited, I ran my program on a few other machines and performed searches, edits, saves and everything else you could do to a database.

Success with Apollo SDE

Everything worked! NOT a single error message!

I arrived early to work the next morning and removed the CodeBase DLLs, replacing them with the new Apollo SDE DLLs. Management arrived at 8:00am and the first words out of my mouth were "It's FIXED!". They looked surprised. At 8:30am, most of the 50 users were running my new program and it was working! No error messages! Apollo SDE SAVED ME!! The management was not only excited to finally use their new program, but was very impressed that it worked in one day! I was very thankful for having switched from CodeBase to Apollo SDE. My travel agency program has bloomed into a 250,000 record database and is still working flawlessly to this day.

Ever since that day, I have converted to the Apollo SDE data engine and have used the Apollo SDE engine exclusively in every program I develop! The Apollo SDE database engine is by far the easiest, most stable and the fastest database library I have ever worked with.

Thank you again ApolloDB for your great software and saving career as a programmer. I do not know what I would have done with out you!! Please keep up the great work.