altSQLite versus Valentina for Rev

[Ken Ray]

On 5/16/05 8:51 AM, "Joel Guillod" <joel.guillod at net2000.ch> wrote:

> Russlan,

(BTW, that's one "s" in Ruslan)
 
> What a good opportunity to explain you some of the reasons why you
> probably miss so many users. My own experience of Valentina has been a
> failure because I have never been able to easily operate Valentina with
> Hypercard/Supercard and more recently with Revolution. Dont reply that
> I should not be an adequate programer, just search the Rev archives to
> understand that many  Revolutionados have made attempts to use
> Valentina with many difficulties and switched to another solution.

Some of that I think is that Rev has its own wrappers around the Valentina
VXCMD, with its own syntax. Obviously, Paradigmasoft isn't going to document
Rev's wrappers; only its own syntax, so there's also a 'translation' issue
between looking at Rev's documentation on how to execute a query, and
Valentina's. Also, many of the issues with using Valentina in Revolution
have been related to where to put the file on disk so that it will build in
properly when creating a standalone. This also is not any fault of
Paradigmasoft.

I learned a long time ago that the Rev wrappers were just too limiting and I
went the route of attaching to and calling on Valentina directly.  It is
just an external, so you can place it anywhere you like and set the
externals to that location. Once you've done that, you just start calling
it.

Now granted, the documentation for Valentina could certainly be better, and
a sample stack that was designed for Rev would help in the learning process,
but I just wanted to bring up that a lot of the frustration with attempting
to use Valentina in Revolution is not related to Paradigmasoft's support of
Rev.

> Yet there is a problem with altSqlite under MacOSX 10.3.9 which crashes
> Revolution in some circonstances but I am confident that Chipp/Altuit
> will fix that soon. As Revolution developers we know that he is very
> active and reactive. You have proven the opposite.

Sorry, I have to strongly disagree here... ever question I have ever had on
working with Valentina has been responded to by a representative of
Paradigmasoft (usually Ruslan) within hours, whether posted to the Valentina
list, or whether I've sent private email to Ruslan to get an answer to a
question. In fact, as you know, Valentina 2 is what they are currently
preparing for Revolution, and yet my client and I have spent the last three
days in multi-hour-long chats with Ruslan and crew to solve a couple of
performance issues I discovered in the 1.11 kernel.

> My last comment is that competition is good! As developers we really
> thank Altuit to have written the SQLite plugin because this finally
> forces Paradigma Software Inc to seriously watch for the Revolution
> developers to give them the consideration and support they actually
> missed until today. BUT be aware that the time is very short not to
> loose the market today! Dont do war, build tools which prooves you make
> the developers' life easier!

Since I'm the one that started the ball rolling on this thread looking for
database suggestions, and after reviewing the email posts, Ruslan doesn't
want to start a DB war, and in fact doesn't even put SQLLite in a directly
competitive light to Valentina, so don't worry about them losing the market
- the "small one-user DB" market is not the area they're focusing on;
clearly the view their competitors as mySQL and PostgreSQL.

Once again, it's the "right tool for the job" - I think the one thing that
Valentina does vs mySQL,SQLLite, and PostgreSQL is that it straddles the
fence between multi-user large DB implementations, and small, personal
single-user implementations. And although it covers a lot of ground, it is
unlikely that for a single-user implementation that you would pay for
Valentina when it is far cheaper to get altSQLLite... however, if you are
starting with a small implementation which will grow to multi-user, or you
have a product where the deployment is in many modes (single user
standalone, single user client/server, multi-user client/server), Valentina
is a good choice.  

Thanks for listening,

Ken Ray
Sons of Thunder Software
Web site: http://www.sonsothunder.com/
Email: kray at sonsothunder.com