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From: Kai Petzke <wpp@marie.physik.tu-berlin.de>
To: Chris Maeda <cmaeda@cs.washington.edu>
Cc: postgres@postgres.Berkeley.EDU
Subject: Re: suitable for mission critical?
Date: Tue, 23 Aug 1994 03:52:19 +0200 (MET DST)
Message-ID: <9408231215.AA16669@lise.physik.tu-berlin.de> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <4687.777577498@wally.cs.washington.edu>

> 
>    Date:    Mon, 22 Aug 1994 11:39:19 -0000
>    To:      postgres@nobozo.CS.Berkeley.EDU
>    From:    David Allan Finch - work <sarum@monosys.com>
>    Subject: Re: suitable for mission critical?
> 
>    |> Insanity.  Get some real business accounting software.  There are
>    |> dozens of commercial packages on the PC.  Do you want to write
>    |> accounting software or build your business?

Chris (not you, but the original poster) said in his mail, that his main
hardware is HP-UX, not PC.  Also, most of the relevant data (like log-on
time of the users, etc.) has to be accounted on unix or at least TCP/IP
machines.  In other words: your flame does not at all answer Chris'
needs.

>    This is not realy helpful is it. If you have the time, experinece
>    and are willing to fix it if it goes wrong, why not. Some companys
>    regaurd spending money but not there employees time with obhorence.
> 
> There is much much more to accounting than what a relational database
> provides.  Why would you want to throw away several months of your
> life duplicating a <$1000 software package that you don't plan to
> market?  It's crazy.

Why do you assume, that Chris will need "several months of his life time"
to write the software he needs?  He did not say, that he was going to
program a nifty user interface.  He needs a few tables, like customers,
bills, payments.  When you do it the right way, and if you already have
good experience in unix tools (perl, awk, shell, etc.) you can set up such
a thing in one week or two.

For example, use pgperl to retrieve the data from the database, and output
it in TeX or *roff format.  At the end of the script, tex and dvips or
groff are called to print the files.  Voila, there is your report writer.
It is even more flexible than most commercial report generators.

Use pgbrowse for entering new customer data.  Use plain ASCII files for
entering payments, and use perl to fold these into the database.


The backdraw is, that homemade scripts are hard to understand for others.
When Chris suddenly gets ill, will there be someone, who knows, how to
operate the software?



Kai


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