Synthetic Systems

Case Study

Government elections

Author: Dan Kloke, President
Company: Synthetic Systems

I own and operate a one-man programming shop. I produce services and software for a small vertical market, political campaigns. These campaigns move fast. Beyond fund-raising (which lasts forever), political campaigns are typified by 3-4 months of increasingly furious activity; then they vanish. Ranging from local (i.e. municipal) to national (i.e. Presidential) scale, campaign data volumes range from 10 thousand to 100 million records, with two peaks of typicality, at 75 thousand and 1 million records. Available equipment ranges widely from five year old loaners to state-of-the-art systems.

When writing applications for this market, three conditions must be satisfied:

  1. Ease of use
  2. Maximum speed
  3. Zero-maintenance

The Apollo products meet these criteria and furthermore allow me to offer my clients:

  • One-step installation (i.e. no BDE/ODBC/JET etc. configurations and no conflicts).
  • Stunningly rapid performance, especially in searches and status/summary reporting. Users often remark about the speed.
  • The widely supported DBF file format gives my customers confidence and flexibility.
  • Built-in encryption allows users to secure sensitive data.
  • A rich and responsive user interface displays record-related information at scrollable, real-time speeds.
  • Advanced querying by xBase or SQL expressions, for the comfort of users familiar with one but not the other.

Apollo's Database Server has opened up a new horizon of possibilities for my clients and myself. I can now offer my clients and customers centralized data storage and on-demand custom processing services without re-writing my application code and without having to develop additional products. I can simply re-use what I have and build on it. Plus I can distribute fixes, updates and enhancements transparently to users using Apollo Database Server's extensive IP-based remote file management and file transfer capabilities.

I have found Apollo to be most stable environment for managing FoxPro data files. Maintenance overhead is never more than the unavoidable. Apollo database products have allowed me to keep my company small and still offer powerful, robust applications and an expanding range of comprehensive services to my clients. And ApolloDB is keeping me abreast of the latest trends and technologies with their aggressive evolution of their product line.