FW Editor: What are your plans or objectives in the near future?
Francis Lavalliere: We plan to use our base plug-in core in order to build other storage engine for Data Warehouse needs.

FW Editor: How and when did you start writing the code for DataController? What inspired you the most? Do you plan to develop new software, or are you more focused on optimizing the current ones?
Francis Lavalliere: The general idea of this plug-in came a long time ago after we have faced many time the same story again and again. As company grow the need to integrate multiple database engines into one easy and single point of access. We want to gather some demand from our users to improve the current plug-in and also to offer new options.

FW Editor: DataController is still a new application. Do you plan to improve in the future? If yes, how are you going to do that?
Francis Lavalliere: We consistently release updates to it. We are still waiting for end-users to share us some defects on the bug tracking system on our launchpad website. We will do our best to solve all possible issues we receive with the product.

FW Editor: DataController has quite a strong competition but, so far, it succeeded in making a name for itself. What do you think about the huge success of DataController?
Francis Lavalliere: We agree that there is a strong competition in the market. The big difference with our product is that it is Open Source. The same kind of strategy can cost massive amount of money. On our side, this is free. We are really happy that many people are interested in our product and we feel that even though this is a Free Product, we are getting more and more interest over high price products that are not as flexible as ours.

FW Editor: What are the advantages of using DataController over any other similar product?
Francis Lavalliere: The highest advantages are about accessing data with Low Price and High Flexibility. Our support team will make sure that anything that someone`s needs will be placed in our next release. We also focus on decreasing the cost of any product line of company where our plug-in could fit in.

FW Editor: Can you tell us more about some of the core DataController's features? What is the most important feature and why?
Francis Lavalliere: The current feature (and unique one) so far, is to be able to link from a MySQL Database Engine any other Tables from MS SQL or Oracle. You could also do high speed join between multiple tables like a join between MySQL, Oracle and MS SQL table if it would make sense. Another big feature would be someone that would like to migrate from their current MySQL solution to a Oracle or MS SQL solution. Our Plug-in would re-write on-the-fly the actual queries that the Application is doing to Oracle or MS SQL and then return the result. This is a big money save as the Product team of the company wouldn`t need to invest time and money to re-write the current solution into the new Storage Engine.

FW Editor: Are you offering any customer support service for DataController users? If not, do you plan to create something like this in the future?
Francis Lavalliere: We currently offer customer service support. In there we have a ticket system service that our support team keep track and try their best to answer the issues as fast as we can. Unfortunately for now, all of this is done only via our ticket system and emails.

FW Editor: Now, to end our small interview, is there any message you would like to send to DataController users?
Francis Lavalliere: Many tanks to you to select DataController MySQL Plug-in. We hope that this encourage you to try out product and submit bug or feature requests.