BASIS ODBC Driver unlocks Business BASIC data for Windows users; nearly a million users may be impacted.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 2, 1997--BASIS International Ltd. today announced that Release 1.1 of its ODBC (Open Data Base Connectivity) Driver will be able to unlock BBX(R) Business BASIC data files which were previously inaccessible to Windows users.

The number of users impacted is substantial, as the language is popular with business software developers and nearly a million users are thought to have applications implemented in Business BASIC from BASIS alone (BBX, PRO/5(tm) and Visual PRO/5(tm) ).

The new release of the 32-bit BASIS ODBC Driver(tm) will be able to read and write non-normalized as well as normalized data files. (Non-normalized files are ones where fields may have subfields, data may be aligned on half-byte boundaries, and more than one type of record may exist in the same file -- all of which are quite common for older legacy data.)

Until now, software developers and data analysts could not take advantage of the full power of ODBC-standard database access and ODBC-compatible applications programs unless data files were first "normalized." This was a severe restriction since more than 140 software vendors, including Microsoft, make their products ODBC compatible. Now business analysts can use new Windows software (including Access, Excel, and Crystal Reports) to access older Business BASIC files, and software developers are relieved of the tasks of writing new programs to do the same jobs as these desktop favorites.

"Most of the activity in an established database -- and especially one that's old enough to be called a 'legacy' database -- is data access and reporting," said John Schroeder, BASIS' chief technical officer. "The new driver gives software developers the ability to do new things with old legacy data. It also makes it easier for them to work in mixed-platform client/server environments, which is extremely important for new applications."

In addition to opening old data files to new applications, Release 1.1 of the BASIS ODBC Driver provides international character set translation, timestamps, support for shared drives, and many more new features. The company claims that the new ODBC Driver provides significant performance increases -- up to 40 percent on selecting data, and up to 8X on transactions, using industry-standard benchmarks.

The ODBC driver is licensed for $150 per copy, with quantity discounts available. Deliveries will begin within 30 days.

BASIS International Ltd. is the largest vendor of application development tools for the Business BASIC language. BBX, the company's multiuser, multitasking version of the language, was first released in 1985. Its great popularity is attributed to its robustness, multi-platform binary compatibility, speed of application development, and the fact that it was specifically designed for business processing. BBX runs on almost all the popular operating systems, including MS-DOS, UNIX, AIX, SCO, Windows, Windows 95 and Windows NT.

The company's current flagship products, PRO/5 and Visual PRO/5, retain all of the traditional capabilities of the language while adding such features as a graphical user interface (GUI), Auditing, Transaction Tracking, Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE), and SQL capabilities.

BASIS is headquartered at 5901 Jefferson St. NE, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87109-3432. Additional information is available by phone at [phone], by fax at [phone], at CompuServe: 76702.1440, at its e-mail [e-mail] or web address www.basis.com .

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