Rant About Software, Part I
Nov 29th, 2008 by epth
Even though I intellectually know that a database is, at it’s core, just a table of information, most database software programs try to make the database into some sort of mystical collection of fragile data that can be corrupted just by looking crossly at it. You might start with a basic database, but then you add users and passwords and permissions and network drives and modes of operation and links to other programs…and you end up with an unwieldy pile of poo that takes 5 minutes to load and 5 seconds to screw up. Why can’t we just make databases that work? Can’t we concentrate on that?
The problem, apparently, is speed. If a database is allowed to be “just a table,” every time you look for some esoteric piece of info from that table, it has to search the whole table for it. This is understandably slow, and so database people since the dawn of time have been coming up with ways to speed up the process. I just so happens that all of these ways are horrible, and they mess up the elegance of the table in all sorts of evil ways.
One things I’ve never understood is why a program would keep you from opening a database if you had permissions for it. Even though we have all these bells and whistle attached to it, the table should still always open. Except it doesn’t. Something in the software gets messed up, and it displays a weird error message and closes. That’s my information — give it back! It then takes several trips to the proprietary knowledgebase or a few phone calls to tech support to fix it so I can look at my table again. What has our software become? What has our speed purchased for us?
The thing is, most businesses don’t need all the extra stuff — they just need a database that’s reliable and customizable to their needs. They usually end up getting a cocktail of overpriced and overly pumped-up databases to cover their sales, billing, payroll, and customer information. Not only that, but those overpriced programs will connect to other programs like Outlook and slow that down, too. You got Quickbooks for payroll and invoicing, Timeslips for keeping track of time and other invoicing, ACT for sales and customer data tracking, Outlook for e-mail and other stuff, and Peachtree if God forbid you have hard-core accounting to do. All of these solutions does more than you could ever want it to, and yet you need more than one of them to meet all your needs. This is disgusting, and nothing can be done to change it…
The best set-up I’ve seen is using Outlook (even though it’s a singularly horrible program — more on this another day) with Exchange Server. If you’ve got the money for it ($699 plus $67-$100 per user license(!)), Exchange allows for people in organizations to share Outlook information — customer databases, e-mail, calendars, tasks — seamlessly and without database errors. You can also share the info to and from anywhere that’s connected to the internet with Outlook Web Access. Do I sound like a commercial? Well, how about this: It’s great, but it’s amazingly expensive (because Exchange provides a ton of other services that nobody will ever use), and it doesn’t print checks or do your taxes or a bunch of other things you need. It’s not a complete solution, but for what it does, it’s pretty good.
Which is more than I can say for ACT, Quickbooks, Timeslips, or heck, anything by Sage, Intuit, Adobe, etc.
And then of course I discovered Google Calendar Sync, and all of a sudden the calendar part of Exchange didn’t seem worth it anymore…and Gmail, which made an Exchange server seem like a comical waste of time and money, or Google Docs, which provided templates for me to use without having to prove that I own the software first, and I was in love. Soon, I realized, all software in the world will be free. Richard Stallman will win the day, it appears. Who saw that coming?
Oh, right…Google.
