Contrary to myth, SQL is diverging, not converging, said Umang Gupta, president and chief executive of Gupta Corp, on a brief trip to the UK Thursday, and that is a trend the Menlo Park, California company is happy to go along with while it runs with the leaders of the technology. He believes that there is no chance of a single SQL standard, that plug and play SQL access is not possible and that users must turn to client-based offerings such as SQL routers, which has ease of use and relatively low cost in its favour. Gupta is not too worried about rivals at the moment, or so he claims, and rejects the Paradox and Access databases, respectively from Borland International Inc and Microsoft Corp, as not being capable of growing into serious SQL players, because they were not designed from the ground up to have serious programming capabilities.
Too small
But in the long term, he does see the enterprise divisions of the two firms as competitors, rather than the likes of Powersoft Corp, whose Powerbuilder product is arguably giving Gupta a run for its money: he claims that 8,000 copies of Powersoft were sold by the end of last year, compared with 20,000 copies of SQL tools. Gupta also took a swipe at the top-end vendors like newcomer, Oakland, California-based Forti Software Inc, by saying they are tackling a market that is too small to be viable, as his research shows 80% of client-server software is on only a departmental scale. But part of Forti’s scheme, as stated last year, is to produce an object-oriented proprietary language, and Gupta has not come up with that yet. The lack of a standard for SQL makes the technology rather like Unix in its heyday: but the vendors eventually banded together through fear of being left in the cold, first in the Open Software Foundation and now in the Common Open Software Environment process. But at this stage, says Gupta, There really is no overwhelming reason for SQL to be unified.
