There is more involved than just keeping members names and addresses,
a ride list, and some points. The AERC has many ride formats and
many awards programs, all of which have to be kept track of,
permanently. There are about 500 rides each year. The office has
three networked workstations (plus a server).
To give just one example of the complexity involved: lets say
there's a ride with a 50 and a 100 on Saturday and another 50 on
Sunday -- three separate rides, but one "event." A man starts the
100 on Saturday and is pulled; his daughter starts the ride on Sunday
and completes successfully. The computer must determine that two
members of the same family, one a parent and the other that parent's
child, started two rides at the same event -- and then credit the
family with 50 miles toward the Bill Thornburg Award. If the man
completed and his daughter was pulled, they would get 100 miles, and
if the both completed they would get 150 miles.
We have a number of awards programs like this, which require
correlating various factors from various sources to determine if
points/miles are awarded or not.
The current size of the database is only about 50 Megabytes, so disk
space is not a problem.
The current program is written in Advanced Revelation, and dates back
to 1984 (at that time, Revelation was the only database program
running on PC's with the power to do what we needed). It has become
inadequate and difficult to maintain. It MUST be replaced.
I offered to write a completely new program, in a modern
Windows-based database system, three years ago. The office felt
that there were too many problems with me living 2,000 miles away
from the office, that they needed someone they could get in the
office on short notice when there was a problem. I understand the
staffs' frustration when I could not get back to them in a timely
fashion, as was often the case. They were offered a substantial
donation toward a custom program from a California programmer, and
decided to go with that. Unfortunately, it has taken much longer to
write than they anticipated, and the cost has long since far
exceeded the donation.
Hope this helps.
--Joe Long Rainbow Connection Arabians PC/LAN Manager home of Kahlil Khai Calhoun Community College AERC Hall of Fame horse jlong@hiwaay.net 11,475 miles completed