When you think about the “killer applications” for the personal computer over the years, you think about spreadsheets, word processors, desktop publishing and multimedia.
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Databases seldom come to mind. Although they have played a significant role in desktop computing, databases tend to be big, bulky, boring things that, thankfully, we seldom have to think about.
In the expanding world of the Internet and new media, however, databases are playing an increasingly vital role. To provide up-to-date information about things like airline or concert tickets, travel planning, product pricing, blue-light specials–databases must constantly be ready to expand and update.
For sales people in the field, being able to access the company’s inventory, pricing and customer information on a moment’s notice has become a strategic advantage. By the same token, the home base needs to know right away when a field sale occurs in order to modify its database accordingly.
In his 1990 Fall Comdex presentation on “Information at Your Fingertips,” Bill Gates showed a video depicting a bread-truck driver doing wireless inventory checking on a handheld PC. The truck driver was able to show a grocery storekeeper that the store needed 30 units of dip chips because Thanksgiving was approaching and the store had run out last year.
Sitting in the Las Vegas Hilton audience at the time, Terry Stepien thought he was seeing fanciful stuff. Today Stepien, vice president of the workplace-database division for Sybase, of Emeryville, Calif., is promoting a product doing the very thing Gates had in mind almost eight years ago.
It’s called Adaptive Server Anywhere, and versions of it run on Windows CE palm-size units (formerly known as PalmPCs), as well as the Palm Pilot III and similar devices. Adaptive Server technology offers two advantages: It is small enough to do robust database management in a tiny device, and it can automatically synchronize data from the field with data in-house. That means when a big sale is reported from, say, Toronto, the inventory at headquarters in, say, Des Moines, is automatically adjusted.
Anyone who uses more than one computer knows how essential synchronization of data between the two machines can be. If you enter an appointment on your Palm Pilot during a trip to Washington, D.C., your desktop PC has to be updated with that appointment, too. If you have a secretary or otherwise coordinate your schedule with others, you have to update your PC immediately or risk doubling up or missing appointments.
Yes, it’s complicated. But one of the big breakthroughs 3Com made with its Palm Pilot was to offer “Hot Sync.” You just drop the unit into a caddy connected to your PC, and all your records–contacts, appointments, to-dos, etc.–are updated between the two units.
Put Adaptive Server technology on cell phones, TV set-top boxes, car-navigation systems and other Windows CE devices, and you open new worlds of data management. Your TV can remind you when your favorite programs are on, or sets itself to record them. Gas pumps, vending machines and other appliances learn your preferences and automate tasks accordingly.
You can even manage home lighting, plumbing and safety systems remotely, as Stepien does with his house. It seemed like a distant dream in 1990. But the advent of the Internet as a mass medium and development of its protocols as a platform for standardization made the “Fingertips” vision a reality, Stepien said.
“The infrastructure caught up much faster than any of us foresaw,” he said. “The excitement surrounding Windows CE and small devices reminds me of when the PC first came out in the early 1980s. People see whole new sets of problems that can now be addressed outside the scope of previous machines.”