Providing web and database services to the Austin metropolitan area.

Database Austin Case Study – Local Austin Laboratory (page 2)

The Challenge

Initially, our customer's software infrastructure consisted of a variety of Visual dBase tables, Quatro-Pro spreadsheets, and DOS applications. The computer system lacked integration, reliability, and flexibility.

A great deal of information was logged on paper, then re-logged into database tables.

Office staff routinely made changes directly to the database tables. This resulted in broken schemas, data entry errors, and unnormalized data.

In addition, their computer system relied heavily on the “Sneaker Net”. To accomplish various tasks, staff members would have to take diskettes from one machine to another to accomplish routine tasks.

The billing system was completely separate from the ordering system. Each month, staff members would massage data from the ordering system, generate a diskette, and manually transfer the information to the DOS-based billing system.

The original database was designed without attention to the principles of database normalization. Customer addresses were redundantly stored in dozens of tables. To make matters worse, no records were timestamped or annotated to indicate the person making insertions. It was impossible to determine the current address of customers.

At the time of the staff turn-over, the laboratory was plagued with computer viruses. Several hard drives were destroyed, and a great deal of time was spent rebuilding systems. Norton Antivirus was installed, and along with staff training, the virus problem was brought under control.

The source code to many critical custom software products was lost. The billing system resided on a DOS machine with an antiquated, unreplaceable hard-drive.

Backups were performed intermittently, with often several months between backup. Our customer was one lightening strike away from losing all customer and billing information.

The initial design (dating back to the late 80's) led to a lack of flexibility for our customer. They literally had to conduct business to fit their software. They could not change services or prices.