Emerald Bay unfurls new version. (Emerald Bay Group's Emerald Bay 3.0, Vulcan) (includes related articles on use of Emerald Bay at Quarterdeck Office Systems and Vulcan's BUFFER feature) (Product Announcement)

Emerald Bay Group

2155 Verdugo Blvd., Suite 20 Montrose, CA 91020 (818) 248-0877; fax (818) 248-2605.

List Prices

Vulcan, $395 Emerald Bay C Toolkit, $395 Pascal Toolkit, $199 4-user Server, $195 8-user Server, $395 100-user Server, $595

Vulcan and the Toolkits each include the personal engine, two-user developer's server, Rosetta, Form Design Utility, Data Base Administrator, and Report Writer. No royalties or runtime license is required.

The silence surrounding the Emerald Bay database system and its future was broken in late September with the release of Version 3.0. Sporting several ground-breaking features and stunning performance improvements, Emerald Bay is now poised to make inroads into a market that has been dominated by high performance SQL servers from such heavy hitters as Microsoft and Oracle.

When dBASEII creator Wayne Ratliff first designed Emerald Bay, he believed that microcomputer users of the future would need to access large amounts of data simultaneously on an enterprise-wide basis. It was readily apparent to Ratliff that the file-server-based technology of dBASE was insufficient to sustain such an effort. He proposed a client/server database management system for the microcomputer platform.

Management at Ashton-Tate, which bought out Ratliff's shares in dBASE, didn't appreciate Ratliff's vision, and so in 1986 he struck out on his own to create what he believed would be the next generation of dBASE. Along the way he made an unfortunate deal with the now-defunct Migent, Inc., to market Emerald Bay. By the summer of 1989, Ratliff Software Production, Inc. had the product in hand, but no marketing organization to sell it.

Enter, the Emerald By Group

For a time, Ratliff tried to develop and market Emerald Bay, but by early 1991, it became apparent this was an unsatisfactory arrangement, and marketing activities were suspended. According to Robert Byers, author of several best-selling books on dBASE and a member of the Emerald Bay development team, "Wayne Ratliff has always been first and foremost a software developer; it's really too much to expect one person to be that, plus manager of the minutiae of marketing and support. Those responsibilities are so very different--even dissonant at times--that it made real sense to separate the two activities."

And so, the Emerald Bay Group …