Hehe, sorry about that. Yes, the product has its limitations, and definitely isn't a fit-for-all-purposes but it does have a very good user interface and that is what I was commenting on. In a way the fact that it is still in use says something about it too, if there were an easy way to replace it functionality wise I'm sure it would have been done.
The problem with tools like these is that they allow people to be far more dangerous than they would otherwise be, but if properly used and with a good eye towards their limitations they can be game changers.
Another product like that is FileMaker pro. I've seen people do absolutely amazing things with it and I've seen people build the stuff of nightmares with it.
I'm talking OG DOS Dataease here. Extract from Oracle, gets manipulated by Dataease, and outputs some HTML files through windows batch files. It's a horrible process that we've virtualized on VMWare so we could have NT running it. This is what happens when management doesn't want to pay for an upgrade. I don't want to talk about it!
Maybe you could convince management that maintaining such a hodgepodge solution is actually more expensive than paying for an upgrade? (I assume you don't work for free :) ).
The problem with tools like these is that they allow people to be far more dangerous than they would otherwise be, but if properly used and with a good eye towards their limitations they can be game changers.
Another product like that is FileMaker pro. I've seen people do absolutely amazing things with it and I've seen people build the stuff of nightmares with it.