Conference ulysse::rdb_vms_competition

474.0. "Sell Against Oracle's Graphics Support" by HGOVC::MARGARETLAU () Mon Oct 30 1989 12:11

    Hi,
    
            One of our customers wants to make use of a 4GL to build an
    application which allows their users, including managers, to look at
    finanical information in text format as well as in business graphs
    including pie chart, bar chart, etc.
    
            Oracle has arranged a demonstration to our customer and the
    customer is very impressed by the demo. Since Rally does not support
    graphics, the best solution that we can propose is Rally and
    Datatrieve (with Rally calling Datatrieve to produce graphics).
    However, it is not a very good solution because :
    
    1. Text and graphics can hardly be displayed on the same screen. 
        
    2. Page forward and backward are supported by Rally. However, if I
       have, say 2 pages of text and followed by a pie chart, there is a
       difficulty in supporting paging for all these 3 pages.
    
    3. Because, the Datatrieve command procedure has to be intrepreted
       during run-time, the performance will not be promising.
    
            Currently, our plan is to demonstrate this solution to the
    customer and at the same time mention about 3rd party products on
    Rdb, such as Focus, which also support graphic and multi-graphs on
    a single screen.
    
            Please correct me if those 3 points are not true and that we
    have a better solution. Or anybody knows how to sell against Oracle in
    this case (since they have a better user interface).
    
            For your information, this customer has a MV3900 which is used
    as a LAN server. They want to make use of the remaining resources to
    build such an application. At the moment, they have a similar
    application on PC. However, they found that broadcasting information 
    to PC's is rather slow.
    
            I would appreciate any help from you. 
    
                 
    
                              

Why Datatrieve?  Why not use RALLY and TEAMDATA in combination, as they
were intended?

What about DECdecision and DECwrite?  Depending on how sophisticated the
reports they want to generate are, this may be a viable solution.  If
they don't want to hook up workstations to the 3900, consider a
non-disclosure on future terminals.  Also, consider the DECwindows
server running on the PCs (I have no idea what the delivery status of
that is, although it was part of the DECwindows announcment).

In addition to FOCUS, consider INGRES-TOOLS-FOR-RDB.

    Actually, we did let the customer choose between TEAMDATA and Datatrieve.
    After going through the SPDs, they informed us that they would consider 
    Datatrieve and not TEAMDATA. It's because Datatrieve has more flexibility
    and it can produce more sophisticated graphics with some programming
    effort.
    
    In addition to those 3 points mentioned in 474.0, I was told that 
    Datatrieve can only accept 3 parameters, meaning that one can only display
    information of Q1 to Q3, but not Q1 to Q4. 
    
    By the way, can you give me more information on INGRES-TOOLS-FOR-RDB ? 
    
    

    DECdecision and DECwrite look to be a good fit.