Who Is A Typical MV-DBMS Developer?

The most fascinating statistic about MV-DBMS resellers and developers is that at least 60% of the principals are not professionally trained individuals with computer-science degrees.

Rather, most came from another business or professional field. Among them, you will find doctors, dentists, pawnbrokers, traffic managers, pharmacists, statisticians, actuaries, and a wealth of other professions. The point to be drawn from this is that when they gravitated to MV-DBMS, they already contained a wealth of professional knowledge - a knowledge about both how things really worked, and about how they could be made to work better.

MV-DBMS gave them one essential element they could not find in any other computer development environment: the ability to turn their dreams into reality rapidly and at relatively low cost: in months rather than years, or in years rather than in man-decades, because they had a programming environment that allowed them to focus on essentials, rather than becoming distracted by too much work and too many minutiae.

This is probably the most important property in a successful business application: the ability to understand what really is, and what is realistically possible. Pretty screens are nice. They can ease eye strain, and they can reduce learning time for new users. But appearance is only a small part of the entire application. The data must be organized intelligently and usefully, must be manipulated and collated with skill, and must be presented in such a way that the obvious and important is not ignored.

And while this is practically achievable in languages and environments which require more, rather than less, human work, a 5 to 10 fold increase in the amount of work to be done increases the possibility of distraction or error a hundred fold.

All of these non-programmers (and their professionally trained brethren also) knew an essential of life: their success would not be determined by the length of time they spent programming. Rather, success would be determined by the degree to which they remained focussed on the core problems and needs of users.