The Invisible Database

In my last post, I wrote about failure, and in particular I observed that you have to fail many times to find something that works. The absolute next thing to observe however is that once you find something that doesn’t fail; you have to nurture it along. Run with it!

David Meerman Scott, in his New Rules of Marketing and PR book had this comment:

Create a number of campaigns and see what hits, then nurture the winners along.

[Pg 96]

Here on the SQL Anywhere team, we have tried very hard to keep our environment open to experimentation, and the possibility of failure. The number of ideas experiments that have failed is large, but so is the number of successes. The products and features we have today grew out of these many experiments:

• the SQL Anywhere database server itself was a result of an experiment in providing a reliable data centric application to one of our customers.
• the idea that 100’s of databases could synchronize in a disconnected fashion grew out of an experiment we shared with one of our first database customers and become our SQL Remote technology
• the idea of a transactional database on a handheld seemed absurd at the time, but we experimented, and created our UltraLite database, initially for the Palm Pilot

The failures are harder to list, because they happen every day, and then *poof* they disappear, as the development team moves to another approach to solve the problem at hand. Usually, the problem being worked on is an attempt to find a solution to a customer problem or need. Rather than accept that the problem can’t be solved, the team simply tries again.

Here on the SQL Anywhere team, a great many of us enjoy working with our customers because we learn so much from them. We especially appreciate talking with customers who are willing to share with us the various ways they have attempted to solve their problems.

ps. I acknowledge that I have been silent for longer than usual. I must admit that I have struggled a bit as of late with exactly what to comment about on this blog that isn’t confidential, and yet still is interesting. Over the last couple months, I have been heavily involved with several specific partners on a number of projects, and very little of it was available for public comment. In numerous discussions with my colleague Glenn Paulley about this, he has provided much needed motivation and inspiration, and for that I thank him.