Birket Foster of MBFA said that the technology will enable multiplatform database joins, something he says his customers already have expressed a need for. “Enough people have been fooled into buying NT servers that there’s an issue there, and they do need to do multiplatform joins,” he said. These kinds of joins span differing types of databases — for example, Oracle on the NT system and IMAGE on the 3000.

Foster’s company licensed the technology, which is based on the Microsoft OLE database standard, instead of building the functionality with its own technology team. “It was a choice of make or buy, and the core of our team is still working on the core of DataExpress,” Foster said. “We’re incorporating technologies so somebody who has to work in a multiplatform environment can have access to all of the data.”