A Little Bit of History

I want to be the first to welcome you to CarsonDB.com. If you are not a software developer or you don’t know what AVImark is, this website is probably not the place for you. It is not that you are not welcome here, but you probably won’t find anything useful. If you do know what AVImark is and you do write software for a living, this will hopefully be a valuable place for you.

You may be wondering what credentials I have to write an AVImark database library. I worked for a small startup company that did this very thing. I wrote integrations for AVImark as well as four other veterinary practice management software databases. At best, I had a tumultuous relationship with the other partners. I was forced out of the company after receiving less money than entry-level computer programmers. Now that the startup company has been sold, I felt obligated to give back to the veterinary community. Truthfully, I was never happy with the product that I had developed as I never felt it had the performance needed.

I have written this implementation of the AVImark database component from ground up. Not only that, I have done my best to make this software perform better than anyone else ever could. I love Assembly language, so I wrote a helper library in Assembly that performs the data mining and searching functions. The top layer, written in C#, does everything else.

I love to write tools that are very fast, but speed is only one part of the equation. If your product isn’t reliable, then all of the speed in the world will be of little value. The code must be accurate. That is why everything has automated unit tests associated with it. In other words, I will not release new code that does not have unit tests associated with it. How do you make unit tests that work with flat file databases, such as AVImark? I wrote a DLL that creates mock AVImark databases. It also creates CSV files the information that should be in the database. The unit test compares the two to make sure it does. If the program that creates the data is wrong, the tests will fail. If the code that reads the data shows a mismatch, the tests will fail. And since there are a significant amount of unit tests, you can feel reasonably assured that the code works well. You can never say that a program is completely bug free, especially in the early stages, but CarsonDB is tested thoroughly.

As always, I would love to hear your feedback. You can reach me by either replying to this blog post or by reaching me through the contact page.