tahsin@rd-atlas.UUCP (Tahsin Choudhuri) (08/23/89)
If you are a small/large manufacturing type organization, I would like to know, what kind of database management system (if any) do you use to maintain information about your purchased/manufactured mechanical and electrical parts. Attributes of data are primarily: mechanical (Screws, Nuts, Bolts etc.), electrical (Diodes, resistors, capacitors) and their technical (e.g. for Screws: length, thread-type etc. for resistors: resistance, dimension etc.), cost related, supplier vendor related information. And the database should allow multi-user access. We are in the process of upgrading our current database system, developed in-house long time ago, in Fortran and assembly language for a Honeywell (DPS-6) machine to a UNIX based Sun system. Primarily, since the Honeywell machine is old, poor in performance, too expensive to maintain etc. etc. We found there are lot of problems associated with porting and the old software didn't have the various "querying" capabilities, which are very common in DBMS systems currently available in the market, and our users wanted. So, the consensus was either to build from scratch an application using Oracle or Ingres (in our case probably Ingres since we already got it for other projects) or buy something from "off-the-shelf" (that may be is based on Oracle or Ingres specifically designed for this type of data management; wishful thinking :-) that could be customized to our needs. Before building the database using Ingres (which we know will be a major effort) this is what I would like to know, if anybody found anything "off-the-shelf" that could be customized for this purpose. I am primarily interested to hear from those who may have purchased commercially available package, particularly suited for this type of data management task and runs on UNIX based Suns, Vaxes or equivalent type of machines, that can be customized to a certain extent, and found it useful. BUT NOT something great that ONLY runs on mainframes. Don't have anything against mainframes, but we can't afford to buy one at this time :-) Or is everybody building their own DBMS for this purpose ? Any comments/pointers will be greatly appreciated, please email directly if possible, I will post summary if I get enough requests to do so. Thanks in advance. -- Tahsin Choudhuri, MN10-2515 Internet: tahsin%rd-atlas@src.honeywell.com Honeywell Inc. MN 55422 U.S.A UUCP: uunet!src.honeywell.com!rd-atlas!tahsin