Mertech Data Systems Inc., a leading vendor of middle-ware solutions for DataFlex, announced today that Defense Contract Management District International (DCMDI), a branch of the U.S. government, will deploy ORAFLex to integrate its existing contract management software with Oracle. ORAFlex is a database driver that allows existing DataFlex applications to work with Oracle RDBMS Servers without changing existing DataFlex programs. Doug Netherton, lead programmer at Systems for Integrated Contract Management (SICM) lab, said, "it was important for us to interface our contract management software with Oracle because the U.S. government is standardizing on Oracle as the back-end. We had two choices: either to rewrite our application in another tool which meant a significant investment, or to find a solution that allowed us to interface our existing DataFlex application with Oracle. ORAFlex provided this option. The migration was seamless, without any changes in source code, and gave us the performance we needed". DCMDI migrated its existing DataFlex 3.05 for Windows application to Visual DataFlex 5 to work with ORAFlex. DCMDI plans to deploy ORAFlex in 20 offices worldwide. In the second stage of the project, Mertech will help DCMDI in connecting the 20 offices to a central database and eventually to provide a secured web-based interface accessible to users anywhere in the world.