MSA funtctionality

Without getting off on a wild tangent, of thousands of concurrent users 
again. Althought I will find a way to do that again,
somebody has to be the dreamer...

IMO if MSA functionality is the goal then there really is only four 
things that OOBase MUST have.
And this would be my priority sequence.

First - Back to reports. Lots of users of MSA are there because it is 
the easiest tool for them
to create reports from their corporate databases. The key word is EASY, 
but it also lets them
get more creatinve as their skills go up. This is the hard part of this, 
MS did a good job of hitting
the mix of ease and strength, that is a tough thing to get right.

Second - The Query Builder. Creating select queries is only the 
beginning. Update and delete queries
are one of the strong points of MSA. At first this seems like more flash 
then substance, but it really
is a feature that users make use of. Now add to this the ability to 
create pivot tables
and you have a large part of MSA's usability for the non-dba.

There is an aspect of the data manipulation by query functionality that 
users I have seen love. The ability to
undue the changes. OK, so we know this is just a case of turning 
autocommit off, and doing a rollback.
But they never had to know that, it is just done for them and they 
therefore feel safe.

Third - Upgrade to the StarBasic tnterpreter. The difference between 
trying to do a simple task in VBA and
 StarBasic is striking. StarBasic just must be pulled, kicking and 
screaming if necessary, away from the API
and up to a 'business object' (or whatever term we come up with, a high 
level) level. Simple test, the second
you find yourself needing to explain what MVC means, you have lost a 
third of potential scripters! If you also
have the ability to use the API directly then all the better, but it 
just can't be the only route.

Fourth - Multi user support. I have no doubt there where good reasons to 
have not supported this in the
intial release. But you need to get it in there as soon as possible.

Andrew Jensen