>>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.
Thanks Fred,

Yeah I worked before in another resseller and we just got our downloads through a T1, the files were big, but the process took them into a SQL server which was being accessed with an Access application running as a client.
I guess the only process is the manula download and process .,..
tx.

marcos oliva