When Databases Go South for the Winter

CAD vendors are keen to extract more $$$ from your IT budget, and one approach is to promise to organize all your design files with their software, call it EDM, PLM, or ETC.

I'm reading a tutorial series by George Mann at the Digital Photography & Macintosh Computers site. In talking about storing digital photographs, he writes:

Step 3: Manually set up a folder for your image files on your computer. I suggest using a very simple (and admittedly boring) system based on the calendar, roman numerals and alphabet. For example: year / month / date / shoot number. This may not be as sexy as an automated database system but it will save you a lot of grief when the database decides to go south for the winter.

CAD vendors like to express their shock, horror, and amazement at customers who use Windows Explorer as their "EDM" [electronic data management] system. But if it works, why not? It's not like the proprietary EDM/PLM software will be around forever -- unlike, say, our digital photographs and digital drawing files.

Comments

[Rob MacEwen]

It might surprise you to learn that those of us who sell data management software don't "like" to express horror at those people who use windows explorer. It might also surprise you that we don’t recommend our solutions to everyone who makes inquiry.

The reality, based on talking with many many many customers is that while Windows file management works for some, for some others it leads to disastrous results.

Storing image files for later retrieval is a fundamentally different proposition than coordinating the efforts of multiple designers working on the same set of inter-related models, drawings and other documents, while keeping track of revisions, while at the same time ensuring release and change procedures are followed.

Horror is hearing about people flying to a customer site to photograph a machine so they can see what they shipped them. Horror is hearing a prospective customer tell you they lost several years of critical engineering drawings because backups were not kept properly. Horror is learning a prospective customer’s designers don’t search their own repository for existing designs but rather redesign everything from scratch.

Personally I and many of my peers work in this industry because we want to help people and the companies they work for become more productive. We listen to customers to find out how we can make them better. If we can we’ll recommend how to improve. If we can’t help then we won’t waste everyone’s time trying to force fit our solution.