Location: Old Amersham, United Kingdom.
Business sector: Sales management and traffic systems for Radio Stations.
website: www.ges.co.uk
Description
GES specialises in systems which allow radio stations to manage sales, schedule commercial airtime, provide pricing controls and analyze audience statistics.
Usage of Firebird
Our systems need to work in a variety of environments, both where an existing IT policy requires us to use other SQL database engines, and also places where no existing SQL server is available. We have designed our applications to work with many back-end servers, but where we have a choice (and in-house!) we use Firebird.
The applications have both an OLTP (for sales management) and OLAP (for audience research analysis) aspect to their usage, and GES has invested a great deal of time in ensuring that all programs work quickly and efficiently with Firebird. In the UK, many of the research databases quickly grow to 10Gb or more in size, yet users want to see fast responses to trend analyses covering many hundreds of thousands of potential audience surveys.
Why we use Firebird
All our systems are designed for corporate multi-user access to provide online information which drives the business (e.g. availability of airtime and pricing), and we have based our products on SQL as the back-end process. In this context, Firebird provides an ANSI compliant SQL engine with full transaction control, is robust yet easy to install and administer.
Secondly, many of our customers are small commercial independent radio stations in the UK for whom price is a key issue with all systems. Our aim is to be able to support all potential customers, regardless of size.
In this context, we recommend Firebird for customers who have no existing IT purchasing policy, as it delivers an effective solution to their needs. The release of Firebird 1.5 has provided a very noticeable increase in performance - even the end users have noticed!