>Hello guys,
>
>I have some questions on regards of Informix and FoxPro.
>Currently I am in an evaluation-project for a midsize telecom company, and
>they have this SCO-Unix based Informix database, which at the present stage on
>one of its main table contains close to 40million rows , extracting this data is kind of a pain in the behind , since they have an "Access" billing-reconciliation system.. arghhh!!.
>
>Extracting the monthly data is a pain since the files are over 1/2 gig in size and I have to export them into tables on Access.
>I have begun some minor process on Foxpro to help me on the daily data process, but still I have to manage with the "Access" thing.
>
>
>
>Questions:
>1)There must be a better way to do this, and if you have experience this in
>the past, I would like to enquire in some alternatives in how to automate the process of extracting data.
>
>2)For Telecoms, I have worked with SQL server backends for their billing systems , Do you guys know of any other systems that runs in Oracle?
>
>thanks for your comments
>
>Marcos Oliva

I worked for a Long Distance reseller for a while. We extracted billing records everyday, rated and billed them. The entire system was FoxPro. Billing detail was broken out into monthly files in order to stay below the 2 gig limit (The CDX was our problem). When ever we needed multi-month data (for customer service) we just ran a SQL statement across the necessary monthly files.

Rating and billing took serveral hours. The person who ran this process would start the down of the files from the carriers and the system would just plod a long for several hours rating the calls. We did this daily so we could build daily billing files and send them up before 5:00 Pm.

Once the calls had been rated, the information would be slammed (excuse the term) into the monthly file. At the time I worked there, SQL Server 6.5 was out and our tests had SQL Server retreiving data about 20% slower. With SQL 7.0 and 2000, the speed differences would not be a facture like it was back then.

I don't know if this helps but it's the way we did it.