Seismic MicroTechnology (SMT) announced its new 64 bit version during its Houston User Group meet last month. The new version includes tools for ‘project mobility and management’ and also represents a transition from Microsoft Access to SQL Server Express. The move to 64-bit means that Kingdom now supports projects of 4GB. The new version also offers multi user support (although not at the same time) and scales to a full blown SQL Server edition for users interested in doing things like scheduled backups.
Internal benchmarking shows respectably fast project copy timing in SSE. The latency and overhead of the new database seems manageable in a typical PC environment. Some of the customers with larger SMT installs were concerned as to how the new storage format would work with file-based backup systems like Legato, as this now requires synchronizing both flat files and the database. One suggestion was to use Microsoft Studio Express to manage the SQL project data.
Of course it is not all roses. SMT is now selling Kingdom in two versions, a regular and ‘Advanced’ edition. This means that users who require some of the interesting new functionality will have to pony-up for the high-end edition. But the main thing is that SMT is getting serious about data management—an interesting development given that for competitor Schlumberger, ‘Petrel data management’ is considered by some as a bit of an oxymoron!
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