Palace Resorts is a pioneer in the all inclusive concept in Mexico. Its unique membership structure allows owners to book any room
in the hotel group, in any season, with all amenities, tips, beverages, etc. included. In the past twenty years, Palace Resorts membership has grown to 65,000, and growing.

Growth and Database Limitations

Palace Resorts’ need for a robust and scalable enterprise-level database was
driven by rapid expansion into new markets, a changing business environment
and growing customer base. As a small upstart, Palace Resorts had been using
DataFlex and its embedded proprietary ISAM database for a number of years.

Their homegrown applications offered small-scale flexibility, until Palace Resorts began to outgrow them. As the company grew in size, so did its needs for a robust and open database.

As their database began reaching its limits,
frequent data corruption resulted in extensive downtime to fix recurring prob-
lems. The challenge for Palace Resorts was to move the database immediately to a more robust platform while maintaining its investment in its existing enterprise system developed with DataFlex without sacrificing on performance.

“We have an overwhelming number of reservations on any given day” said John Stroker, I.T. Director for Palace Resorts. “For each reservation, we have to check several factors including membership status, room availability and payment status, to name a few. With our rapid expansion and complex database demands, we hit the limits of our DataFlex database and had an urgent need to move to a stronger and more scalable database system running on Linux.

The Mertech Solution

“Mertech’s Flex2SQL products offered us the flexibility to choose a number of
database options for our DataFlex application. After analyzing the cost of ownership and our ongoing commitment to open-source standards, we opted for MySQL 5.0.” said Stroker.

Palace Resorts began to look at moving to Mertech drivers around 2001. Stroker comments, “We had seen the Mertech products at a DataFlex convention. We tried them out on a couple of small databases that we were attempting to migrate and we found that instead of the problems that we previously faced in accessing the information, Mertech offered a quick migration that was virtually seamless to the end user.

“We have developed a technology that allows our customers to preserve their
investment in their existing database application while allowing them to move to a new database platform without performance degradation.” says Riaz Merchant, President of Mertech Data Systems.

Visible Results

“The most important benefit we’ve seen is a huge increase in data access speed and performance, which allows us to maximize server and network performance,” said Stroker. “Without Mertech drivers we would have had to purchase a large number of faster servers with expensive options in order to increase speed and overcome the serious drag that we were experiencing with performance.

Our entire system is much more efficient and our users experience prompt, near instant access to everything that they need to do. Monthly reports, customer reservations, inventory levels are all much faster with Mertech drivers installed.”