Databases

Flairtex became involved in a company called Sportbrain Inc of USA. Never before has so much diverging technology has ever been used to reach a single goal. At the heart of it is an Oracle database that knits in the surrounding systems. The database is accessed via coldfusion web pages and stored procedures. It is a welfare product that you wear on your belt. It measures the amount of steps that you do. It can also measure activity rate as well. If you are a manager and you want to get productivity going in the office, give one of these each to your team. There will be less days off with stress and illness and the team will be more 'together'. It is being used as a Gym Retention tool in America but soon be available in the UK. The Oracle database was on a Sun 490 Box running Solaris, it was then ported to a Red Hat linux box with a RAID server.

Oracle has to be the Big Daddy. For transaction processing it is the safest, most comprehensive database around, so who uses it? Like Big Financial Institutions and various Defence forces around the world. If a transaction doesn't go through on the web page the programmer can roll back so that the database is not effected. Version 8.5 was difficult to maintain, A DBA was always required to be on call, Version 9 is much more maintainable. Oracle qualified staff cost an awful lot because they keep the database intact. With an Oracle DB there are millions of records that need to be protected. If something happens, the database needs to be brought back to life quickly and this is the responsibility of the DBA and this is why they are so expensive.

A recruitment database migration from MS Access to MS SQL Server 2000 was done using .net ADO technologies alowing connectionless protocol and fast response times to match client and candidate details. This catered for 1000's of candidates as the old ms access system could not cope due to overloading of candidates and search requests.

Flairtex migrated a dataflex application for a client that had used Concurrent DOS at the time. The database was converted to a VB system, interfacing to SQL Server 6.5 database. The VB application had the same fast key click interface so that the users would not have to relearn how to use the system and as such easy to re-educate the relevant personnel.

The Company developed a MS SQL Server database for a vintners. The database was built so that there could be fast lookup to find out more about the grape variety and its profile and what were the best meals that would go with it.  The data collected for the database used VBA scripts to interface with a MS SQL Server so that MS Word form could be collected from various computers and then ported onto the server at the touch of a button. The client use to supply me the information on a diskette and then it ran straight into the database with the use of stored procedures. The ASP web site and database was then uploaded to a host, so it was easy to maintain and dynamically driven by the database.

Flairtex has an ongoing interest with mySQL too, with the introduction of version 4 caching allows the database 100% faster access than version 3. There are a couple of projects in the making, a translation web site and a book shop both are going to be using mySQL 5 when it is launched. Version 5 will have stored procedures and will definitely be competing head to head with Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases. Considering that it is free, it will be a great success.

Flairtex then "flexed" to become Flairtex Ventures Ltd as more expertise was pooled into other information systems, such as creating a full e-commerce .net ASP for a Vintners (done in ASP) and with it came database interfacing using stored procedures. (MS SQL/Server 6.5 and then migrated to 7).