One way to learn Accpac programming is to record a VBA macro and see how it calls Accpac’s business objects. It’s no great leap to realize that you can take that recording and customize it. Add a button to an Accpac screen? You can do it, and it works! Oops – it only works for a while. Change the environment, change the Accpac settings, upgrade the Accpac version and the macro can – and probably will – break.

YOU CAN customize Accpac. Use VB, not VBA. Properly separate and register your copy of an Accpac screen control. Talk to the appropriate Accpac business objects. Create a proper install / uninstall program. Yes, this may cost 20% to 30% more initially, but it pays off in the long term.

Non-technical people are frustrated with software breakage in its many different forms. In my mind, there is movement away from an open Windows platform partly because of this breakage. Platforms that are more closed than Windows are attracting new customers. There is less software breakage on platforms such as the iPod, Blackberry, PS3 and Xbox, to name just a few.

The Accpac community is based on the Windows platform. This will not change anytime soon. It is in our best interest to keep customer satisfaction high and their frustrations low.

SQL Server (0.5 Gb) 751 minutes
SQL Server (1.0 Gb) 681 minutes
SQL Server (2.0 Gb) 563 minutes
SQL Server (4.0 Gb) 708 minutes
Pervasive (2.0 Gb) 225 minutes

You may conclude that sometimes adding memory speeds up SQL Server and sometimes slows it down. You may conclude that Pervasive is sometimes faster than SQL Server. TaiRox makes no claim that the relative performance exhibited here is reflective of relative performance in any other circumstance. Our integrity testing labs are single user, single machine environments dedicated to a particular purpose, which is to restore Accpac data and test its integrity. Our labs provide opportunities to make comparisons that cannot be easily scheduled in a production environment.

Periodically checking the integrity of Accpac data is important to the health of any installation. This importance does not diminish as a database grows. However, it may become impractical to have a scheduled integrity check performed every night on a production server, once the integrity checking time grows into many hours. This impracticality is one reason we started our automated off-site service.

All times cited relate to a 14 Gb production database, which dbdumps down to 2.7 Gb, the resulting dump compressing down to 150 Mb. We transfer the compressed result to our cloud servers in under 90 minutes over a very modest quality connection. All servers have “clean Accpac installations”. Times are relatively consistent from day to day.

Java provides operating system independence and, in my opinion, EXTREME version-to-version compatibility. Given these characteristics, it is no surprise that the Java language and runtime definitions are formal and abstract. This can frustrate programmers learning the language who want to “do the simplest thing”. Web sites like javapractices.com, stupidjavatricks and dreamincode.net can help, but you may find that the examples assume some knowledge of Java history.

Here’s a typical problem programmers run into. Given a string named boyfriends, the snippet ‘boyfriends.replaceAll(“Joe”,”Rick”)’ will do what you might expect – replace all occurrences of “Joe” with “Rick”. This might lead you to believe that the snippet financials.replaceAll(“($1000.00)”, “-$1,000.00″) would perform a similar task. It won’t. The first parameter to replaceAll is interpreted as a “regular expression” – a mechanism programmers either love or hate.

Google “Java replaceAll without regex” and you’ll get some good snippets. Some snippets will tell you to use the Java 1.5 (aka Java 5.0) method ‘replace’ – look this up in the API and you’ll have to read through abstract class definitions for CharSequence (what does “not refine the contract for equals mean”?). Some snippets will use StringBuffer objects (in early days, efficiency sometimes won out over readability). Some snippets will throw Exceptions. If you want a plain, String-based, works-with-all-versions, throws-nothing, easy-to-read method, try this snippet:

static String changeAll(String original, String find, String replace) {

  if (original==null || find==null || replace==null)
    return original;

  if (find.length() == 0) return original;

  int matchOffset = original.indexOf(find);

  if (matchOffset < 0) return original; // no match found

  String leftSide = “”;

  if (matchOffset > 0) {

    leftSide = original.substring(0, matchOffset);

  }

  String rightSide = original.substring(matchOffset + find.length());

  return leftSide + replace + changeAll(rightSide, find, replace);

}

Myth: The resulting files will always contain a consistent copy of the data.

Please note that the comments below have nothing to do with collation issues, which are a separate issue and well explained elsewhere.

I’ve heard many business partners say that they use Accpac’s Database Dump utility to create backups and that they do so while users are logged into the system. There is no guarantee that the resulting data, once loaded, will pass Accpac’s data integrity check or that it will function with Accpac error-free.

It is fairly easy to illustrate this. One user is posting purchase orders with costing (therefore invoking inventory day-end for each purchase order). The admin user starts a Database Dump operation which dumps data into files on a table-by-table basis, in alphabetical order. So the time sequence, considering both users, can be: write out inventory files (admin user), post some purchase orders (other user), write out purchase order files (admin user). How can the inventory files contain the correct quantity on purchase order? They can’t.

There are worse problems, in the sense that Accpac may “freeze up”. For the same scenario, when the table ICOPT is dumped the current value for the day-end-sequence-number is written out to the ICOPT file. By the time the table POPORAH (containing the sequence number as a key) is dumped out, the inventory sequence number has changed – but the ICOPT file is already written out. If you restore the resulting dumped files, Accpac will not function correctly (for long).

What to do? Make sure all users are logged out of the system when you do a Database Dump. Do you have any backup/restore/data-integrity questions? Please give me a shout. Partners attending TPAC may have heard that TaiRox is working on a comprehensive “Accpac Off-Site Backup and Restore Testing Service”, which we call SOX Backup. We’re happy to share what we know and would like to be aware of all the issues being dealt with in the field.

“Bill and Steve figured that Microsoft was heading for a significant downturn many years ago, with Apple and Google looking particularly threatening. So they decided to have the downturn be “not on Bill’s watch”. Bill would become software architect, repositioned himself as a geek and then retire. At the right moment, Bill would return to save the company, giving Bill’s and Steve’s stock positions an incredible boost.”

All the fun is in the supporting arguments.

Firstly, Bill Gates has such a competitive personality that to retire, playing bridge with Warren Buffett and giving away money in his golden years just doesn’t fit his personality profile.

Secondly, to compete with Apple (“it just works”), Microsoft really needs to control the hardware platform for their products: coming soon, a Microsoft PC. In case this backfires, it will be Steve’s decision. Microsoft already makes a PC (the  Xbox), as well as mice, keyboards, tablets, Zunes and so on. It is hardly a leap for them to produce a Windows PC.

Thirdly, Microsoft has so much cash that they can afford to wait until Apple or Google stumble. Sooner or later, an opportunity will arise. That will be the moment of Bill’s return.

Fourthly, Bill Gates has consistently been underestimated throughout his career. To believe that he “didn’t see the downturn coming” is yet another underestimation.

- Scientific American, June 2010

“These vendors … are bringing unprecedented levels of performance computing power to enterprise IT shops … the software industry … has lagged in developing apps to correctly parallelize workloads to take advantage of multiple cores.”

- Computer World, May 18, 2010

Moore’s law as originally formulated in 1965 stated that the number of transistors per integrated circuit was doubling every year. One broadly used re-formulation states that computer performance per dollar is doubling every 24 months. Is this still true? Does this mean that Accpac users can expect their performance to improve by a factor of 2 every 24 months based on integrated circuit technology, should they choose to upgrade their hardware that frequently?

My answer is, “No, any accounting performance improvement is likely to come from other factors, such as solid state drives.” There is an unpleasant truth in the IT industry that no one wants to talk about. Intel introduced a 3GHz processor in 2002. It is now 8 years later and typical clock speeds are still less than 3Ghz. All the talk now is “multi-processor” or “multi-core”. While it is true that clock speed isn’t everything, it is by far the most important factor in typical business applications. Why?

A multi-processor or multi-core system can dramatically improve the performance of any algorithm that can be “parallelized”.  Any software system that must be frequently “synchronized” is NOT a good candidate for parallelization. Neither is a system involving “locks” and “dependencies”. Accounting systems are NOT good candidates for parallelization. Are multi-processor, multiprocessor systems useful for something? You bet! They are great for running multiple virtual machines on a single box (but watch out for shared resources like network cards).

When clock speeds doubled every 2 years, it was easy to justify buying new machines, new operating systems and new or upgraded accounting systems. Along with some useful features, users got speed. Now they don’t. As an industry, we must take care.

Will a second server improve performance? It might. In an Accpac environment, there could be advantages to splitting off a database server or a domain controller. Both of these can be hammered in a large installation and create contention problems. The problem with using this reason is that it when a customer tries out this solution, it will seem like there is no performance gain whatsoever. Any advantage is likely to only show up in the most contentious 5-10 hours in a 200 hour month.

Is a second server a helpful part of a recovery strategy? It could be. Doing a test restore or a data integrity check on your primary server isn’t the greatest idea in the world. If your server goes down, having a warm stand-by server would be really nice. The trouble with this reasoning is that the benefit seems fuzzy and conditional. I’ve heard customers say, “We have a backup!” in an annoyed tone of voice.  Sure, but have you ever tried to restore that 5 year old tape using a drive that no one makes anymore?

Will a second server be necessary in an Accpac 6.0 environment? You’d think so. A database server normally is in the most protected area of your network. A web server normally runs in a de-militarized zone – if it’s not exposed to the internet with self-service applications what good is it? I’ve tried convincing customers of this. The argument almost works, but something in their glazed-over eyes tells me they’re not completely convinced.

It’s easy to dismiss any single reason to add a second server.  Isn’t the truth, “Experience shows that there are many advantages to segmenting network functionality?” Building a network doesn’t end with server number one. I’d like a better sounding answer. Does anyone else have one? If so, I’d be glad to hear it.

It may be my imagination, but it seems to me that I remember Microsoft announcing Windows for mobile devices many years ago after some innovator had created a mobile platform. Wasn’t this yet another vaporware announcement accompanied by an analyst’s report saying that Microsoft would have 90% market share within 2 years? And who could argue, with their track record?

Many of us exist within the Microsoft eco-system. They push new software versions and we all make a living keeping customers “up to date”. Maybe the world is changing. Business computing doesn’t change fast, but iPods and BlackBerrys are here to stay and driving many aspects of the high tech industry. And … hard as it is for some of us old-timers to imagine, Microsoft does not dominate this space.

I read the page 18 interview with Juan Loaiza, Oracle’s Senior Vice-President of Systems Technology. The Exadata uses “Flash” (solid state) technology to store the data. Loaiza made what I thought was an insightful comment, “having Flash look like a disk drive … limits the performance quite a bit.” He comments that the Exadata is a “second generation” use of Flash – whereas first generation may look like a disk drive, Oracle and Sun have seen past the first generation into something that will work much better for database operations.

Could Accpac performance be dramatically improved with second generation use of solid state technology? Accpac’s object orientation would suggest that this is possible, perhaps yielding some 10x performance gains, which would allow Accpac to scale up into higher end companies. How much R&D effort would be required to produce a relatively inexpensive (say $10,000 to $20,000) Accpac database box? I’d guess that the R&D effort involved would be less than $500,000, perhaps considerably less. Interesting days, we’ll see what happens.

Besides snow, yearly summaries span us mercilessly – the top 10 IT announcements of 2009 – the top 10 technical predictions for the coming decade. This also got me thinking – how important is Accpac-in-a-browser, for the ERP mid-market?

It’s tempting to dismiss this Sage strategic initiative. I’ve heard people say, “How many accounting clerks really care whether they enter invoices in a browser or not?” This reminds me of the great debates when accounting software was moving from DOS to Windows – “How many accounting clerks want to use a mouse, which will only slow them down?” To me, the anti-browser arguments miss the mark. There are critical issues such as mobility, remote-access, self-service, reliability, data protection, performance, device independence and inter-operability – all of these factors are driving change and a push towards “cloud computing”.

There’s something else worth mentioning. How easy is it to sell ERP software against competition that runs in a browser? How easy will it be in three years?

Is running Accpac in a browser a product strategy? I’d say no – there are at least a half-dozen other elements needed to weave a coherent product strategy. However, running in a browser is a core element and a worthy Sage initiative that deserves broad support from resellers and development partners.