Anpesil Distribution Services (ADS) is a refreshment products wholesaler serving a thirteen state geography in the Northeastern part of the United States. Sales revenue for 2001 was 64 Million dollars. Anpesil was listed as 73rd largest Hispanic-owned business in the US. Prior to migration, ADS used DataFlex version 3.05 for SCO Unix.

Business demands led to changes

According to Guido Gallicchio, President of ADS, "As ADS's business continued to grow, it became apparent that we would soon need to upgrade our character-based programs to a GUI front-end and at the same time move to an open client/server database that would allow us greater flexibility to quickly respond to changing reporting needs".

ADS decided that the best and most economical option was to move their character-based DataFlex applications to Visual DataFlex and move the database to an Oracle back-end. "The Oracle database provides the raw processing power to quickly develop and deploy very complex, data intensive reports without the need to "custom code" reports as was often the case with the DataFlex Database system".

Tangible Impact on Business

The database migration took place in March of 2000 after a several rounds of testing. "The only change was the addition of a few lines of code to automatically log the application into the Oracle 8i database. Everything else worked as it always had, thus preserving our investment in our existing code", say Guido.

In Guido's opinion, "Visual DataFlex is one of the best tools available today for quickly developing and deploying a consistent, database intensive, user interface. Oracle's native PL/SQL language is the ideal platform for batch processing and data integrity operations. The ability of the Mertech's driver to call Oracle Stored Procedures and Functions along with the seamless integration with existing DataFlex code, gives us the ideal programming environment"

With its new Oracle and Crystal-based reporting, ADS is now able to quickly develop reports that run several hundred times faster than with our DataFlex database.

Guido goes on to say, "We are extremely pleased with Mertech's product. It has allowed us to migrate to the database platform of our choosing while allowing us to leverage our legacy systems"