Location: Graz, Austria.
Business sector: CallCenter, Consulting CallCenters, CallCenter Software Design and Development.
website: www.clientel.at
Description
Our customers are typically in Austria and Germany. And we specialise in providing Press companies with call centres.
Usage of Firebird
Firebird is the heart of our software "Clientel Suite". We started years ago with Interbase 4.0, and use now Firebird 1.5.1 SuperServer on Windows Servers (Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Windows 2003). Clients use Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows XP systems. For Web-access via PHP we have installed one Linux Web Server with Firebird. Whilst Delphi is our development tool, and IBObjects provides the database connectivity components for Firebird.
Nearly 200 users with high concurrent updates are using firebird on seven servers, with 21 1-2 GB databases, 6 to 7 days of the week and 12 hours at a time. 60 users on one location.A typical database has more then 1000 tables, 70 stored procedures, and a lots of generators, and some tables have more then 1 million records.
We also use Firebird for our own database driven registry, internal mail-system, in a workflow integrated mailingserver (fax, email, print), ticket-system, Microsoft word document storage, a PHP driven picture webpage system (without tempfiles, that directly streams stored blob pictures to the customer browser), and finally Our last software product is Clientel Datamatch, which uses the Firebird, to provide german optimized metaphone and fuzzy logic matching.
Why we use Firebird
- It's functional, fast and secure.
- Backup/Restore is easy and fast. We backup every day, and restore only one in month to refresh the databases.
- Our customers have not to pay for database licences, this is an advantage for our business and allows for a "fast return of investment".
- We can use other operating systems, not only Windows, if we need it.
- We needed BLOB support to store documents.
- Firebird is easy to install, maintain and is straighforward to understand.
- Firebird doesn't need 100 MB and more of files to make it work.
- We now have a lot of experience (7+ years) with both Interbase and Firebird since 1.0 and we trust this database engine. As software developers we enjoy it.