Database Consulting Group LLC Blog

DCG has been very quiet for some time.  Not much activity on any of our sites, and our dataphor.org and alphora.com sites have been down for a couple weeks.  Though this doesn't look good, I assure you we're still around and nutty as ever (speaking at least for myself).

I'll take this opportunity, being that this is the first blog post of the year, to give an update of where we stand and where we are going:

• Dataphor - Yes we still love Dataphor and continue to support and incrementally improve it.  The dataphor.org and alphora.com websites are down because we basically have one server and it was in need of a software rebuild.  You can thank all of the nice people who have nothing better to do than troll for vulnerable wikis and web servers.  You see, we DO have something better to do than patch and counteract said nice people, which is why our server reached the point of crippled.  Anyway, we are trying to do a little better job this time to lock everything down properly and reduce our "surface area". 
  With some community Tender Loving Care (TCL), Dataphor really could be a big success, but quite frankly with only us it would probably never break out of it's little niche.  That said, it's really not a bad niche to be in, and at the end of the day it gives us an advantage regardless of it's popularity, or lack thereof.
• Consulting - Consulting is presently our bread and butter as a company, and we count ourselves lucky to have some nice clients to work with and interesting projects to work on.  In the financial service world we're working on a hardware interface, business intelligence, lending systems, and other such things.  We're wrapping up a medical records system and starting a medical scheduling system.  We have also been doing some other smaller consulting projects.
• Mystery Project - Shh, part of our quietness is related to a secret project.  We should be able to make some kind of announcement on it in as early as 2-3 months when we hope to go beta.  No this is not some kind of Dataphor replacement.  This is an entirely different product for an entirely different purpose.  Fine, I'll say one little thing: it is relational, at least in spirit.  We are very excited about this project, and hope that we don't take the good idea and botch it up too badly in execution.

Long term, we still have our sights on big things.  We would like to do something about the complete insanity we call modern software; or at least provide a vehicle for those that think the same way.  Once you start down the path of realizing that there are fundamentally better ways to do things, you'll never be content with the status quo; thus is our lot.  We plan to give options for those seeking more abstract, powerful, and mathematical solutions to data management (hint, all software problems are data management problems).  It won't be for everyone, but the rest of the industry can continue to swim in a vat of their own complexity if they so choose.

Here's to 2009, the best year yet!