Post
by TimFoster » 20 Sep 2007, 17:52
Posted by: Tim Foster
Our maximum user volume consists of a few 50 user installations, although
I'm unsure if the full concurrency is really utilized. We support over 100
clients, perhaps 30-40% running network editions... As far as single-user
instances go, everyone is running 8.5... In network-land, a variety of
engines have been implimented, from 6.1.2 onward. In our industry --
payroll and taxes -- most organizations are very cautious and reluctant to
upgrade business critical components -- IE, if it ain't broke, don't fix
it... Especially when they're unlikely to see immediate performance gains,
as our application doesn't exploit many of the newer features...
Backwards compatibility is very important to us -- we provide year-end tax
filing software for large corporations, storing and processing employee
W-2's. Applications are released anually -- and due to the nature of the
bid'ness, and the desire to archive tax data as long as possible, we find
clients may continuing to host legacy data and applications going all the
way back to 1994! As the front end components were all 16bit back then, and
we have niether the time nor desire to recode past software releases to
include 32bit libraries, we find we are in a constant state of environmental
flux. At times we're forced to get 16bit single user engines to play nicely
with 32bit single user engines on the same machine, sometimes easy,
sometimes not... Or we find ourself installing our software on machines
containing other vendors mismatched, misversioned SQLBase components (we
install a single user, they have a network client install, vice-versa,
etc...) These are all issues we encounter somewhat regularly, and though
most can be overcome through .BAT file trickery, renaming folders and such,
a respectful attempt to maintain compatibility would be greatly appreciated!
A few clients host our software, in addition to other internal applications
on Oracle 8.x backends... this has kept us at Team Developer 3.0 PTF4 -- as
the newer releases no longer support Older oracle components... So all in
all, with respect to both products... backwards compatibility! :-)