Hi there. I am hoping that someone here can offer me some database
advice.

I work at a small company that makes frozen products that are sold in
supermarkets. We recently hired sales reps in several cities in the US
and Canada to maintain our displays in stores and to take orders from
those stores. Each rep visits 12 stores a day and take a digital photo
of our display at each store. Then they go home, write up an email to
us about the situation at each store, attach the digital photos to the
emails, and send it to us. Then they write emails to the local
distributors containing their orders for the day and send them,
cc'ing us.

The system is working well, except as we add more and more sales reps,
the flow of information into the Head Office is becoming a raging
torrent, and frankly we can't keep up with it. So, we came up with
the great idea to automate the entire process via a database-driven web
application. The idea is that the sales reps should be able to log into
a site, enter a user name and password, then enter and upload their
report, photos and orders for the day, which would thereafter be stored
in a database that we could access from the Head Office.

There is a lot of data to input: Store Name, Street Address, City, Zip,
Store Contact etc. etc., plus all our various distributors and
individual products. We figure that the system should be robust enough
to handle at least fifty sales reps covering a total of 3,750 stores.

We sent RFPs to several software companies and received several bids
back. Okay, here comes the question part: Roughly half the bidders want
to use Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP while the other half wants to use
Microsoft/IIS/MS SQLServer/.NET. (We are currently running a Microsoft
server in the office, but if it was cheap enough, I suppose we could
add another server running LINUX.)

My question is: Which solution is "better", and, from my (user's)
point of view, do I even care? (The software-building costs are about
the same for both types of system.)

I am looking for a robust system that will last our company for several
years, that can be added to as we think of more bells and whistles, and
that will need minimum maintenance.
Thank you in advance!

Curious Pete

Hi.

Curious Pete wrote:

Since you are developing a web-based application, the users won't see a
difference whether you're using Windows or Linux in the background.
I know that the new Gupta SQLBase 9 for Linux is faster than the Windows
version, but that's mainly because the Linux file-system is faster. I
think, this point applies to Oracle and Sybase as well. So I'd go for
Linux.

SQLBase requires a very small amount of maintenance. You won't need an
administrator just for the database. Backup and crash recovery is very
easy as well. However, it's not free.

You can find an evaluation copy at www.guptaworldwide.com

HTH

-Niels-